6 ms·
> That only says that Google discourages such actions Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content. "Are you deleting content from your site b
by meragrin_ 3y ago
> That only says that Google discourages such actions
Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content.
"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"
- reaperducer 3y ago"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!" I guess that Googler never uses Google. It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.
- resoluteteeth 3y agoI think in this context, saying that it's not a thing that google doesn't like old content just means that google doesn't penalize sites as a whole for including older pages, so deleting older pages won't help boost the site's ranking. This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results. The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
- romusha 3y ago"poor writing" is the new "merely joking guys!"
- pphysch 3y ago"Taylor Swift before:2010" With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dannysullivan 3y agoThat Googler here. I do use Google! And yeah, I get sometimes people want older content and we show fresher content. We have systems designed to show fresher content when it seems warranted. You can imagine a lot of people searching about Maui today (sadly) aren't wanting old pages but fresh content about the destruction there. Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide#freshness https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking... But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query. If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
- Dalewyn 3y agoJust because someone says water isn't wet doesn't mean water isn't wet.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThe contrived problem of trusting authority can be easily resolved by trusting authority
- Dalewyn 3y ago"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -George Orwell, 1984
- havnagiggle 3y agoClaims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
- legutierr 3y agoDo the engineers at Google even know how the Google algorithm actually works? Better than SEO experts who spend there time meticulously tracking the way that the algorithm behaves under different circumstances? My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases. SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google. Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control. I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.
- joe_the_user 3y agoYeah, Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.
- dannysullivan 3y agoI work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN for X terms" thing I've found. But I do try to check, and sometimes people ping me. In addition, if you want an explanation of how Google works, we have an entire web site for that: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/
- allendoerfer 3y agoGoogle Alerts come to mind.
- 3y ago
- olalonde 3y agoMaybe not related to the age of the content but more content can definitely penalize you. I recently added a sitemap to my site, which increased the amount of indexed pages, but it caused a massive drop in search traffic (from 500 clicks/day to 10 clicks/day). I tried deleting the sitemap, but it didn't help unfortunately.
- graeme 3y agoHow many pages are we talking about here?
- olalonde 3y ago100K+. Mostly AI and user generated content. I guess the sudden increase in number of indexed pages prompted a human review or triggered an algorithm which flagged my site as AI generated? Not sure.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe. I am flabbergasted by people that are gaslighting people into not being "superstitious" about Google's ranking.