My first reaction was to think "Google is a shitty search engine if CNET can improve their search ranking by deleting information." But then I thought about sc

My first reaction was to think "Google is a shitty search engine if CNET can improve their search ranking by deleting information." But then I thought about scenarios where this might be legitimate. If we assume: 1. Google has some ability to assess the value of content that isn't 100% reliable at a per-article level, but in aggregate is accurate. 2. Google therefore has the ability to judge CNET's content quality score in aggregate, and use that in search rankings for individual articles. 3. CNET knows that they have articles that rate well on Google's quality score, and articles that rate poorly. 4. CNET has reason to think they can generally distinguish "good" articles from "bad" articles. THEN it would (could?) make sense to remove the "bad" articles in order to raise their aggregate quality score. It's kind of like the Laffer Curve of Google Content Quality. Overall traffic could go up if the "bad" articles are "bad" enough. That said, unless CNET was publishing absolutely useless garbage at some point, it would make a lot more sense to just de-index those articles, or even for Google to provide a way for a site to mark lower-quality articles, so Google understands that the overall quality score shouldn't be harmed by that article about the Top 5 Animals As Ranked By Hitler, but if someone actually Googles that, it's fine for CNET to have retained that article, and for Google to send them to it. In short: Google advising sites not to do this when there are perfectly reasonable alternatives seems silly.