Discussing CNET’s content-pruning to improve SEO ranking

https://tedium.co/2023/08/11/content-pruning-news-websites-is-stupid/

by marban • 3 years ago

141 79 3 years ago

jwilk• 3 years ago

3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068464 ("CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking", >500 comments)

hitekker• 3 years ago

Ouch. Google's SEO PR rep really messed up the damage control. So many non-answers and links that essentially say "I'm not an engineer but trust me, the engineers I talk with say you're all wrong."

jasongill• 3 years ago

Welcome to Google's SEO PR strategy since their inception. If Google says to do something, you should try to do it. If they say NOT to do something, you should definitely do it.

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

I'd be surprised if search engines don't penalize websites that 404 previously crawled pages. They'd want to avoid the risk of a page disappearing and causing a poor user experience.

causality0• 3 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Link rot is a cancer we should all work against.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

Websites get redesigned, companies go out of business, etc. It's a nice principle that links should live on forever, but it's not very practical for a decentralized web (which many profess to be in favor of).

TZubiri2• 3 years ago

Yes. Things should not die, we should all live forever, as bits and bytes

rpgbr2• 3 years ago

Not necessarily 404. They could redirect (301) to another, better ranked similar content.

lolinder4• 3 years ago

That doesn't work for a news site—unless they're doing a ton of duplicate stories for some reason, "similar" isn't good enough if someone is looking for an article to go with a specific headline they found through search.

telmo• 3 years ago

They clearly couldn't care less about user experience. This is all about selling ads. The web was a beautiful thing for a moment in time, but the rotting corpse that is left after "adtech" did its thing is an anti-user monstrosity, to a degree that is almost comical.

justrealist• 3 years ago

an anti-user monstrosity

The web today has 6 billion users instead of maybe 50mm in the golden age you're reminiscing about.

snowwrestler3• 3 years ago

It depends on the pages. Search engines actually reward sites for 404ing previously crawled pages, if the pages had little value in the search index.

Whether that is done on purpose, or is an unintended side effect of other ranking decisions, is up for debate.

visarga• 3 years ago

A news website is not a bonsai tree

well said

ethbr1• 3 years ago

But if traffic originators (e.g. Google) have a bonsai section that comprises the front half of their results... you can't fault a lot of non-bonsai trees for considering how they might qualify.

At the end of the day, this is Google's mess.

The article summarizes the situation well (clarification added by me):

> I think CNET is making a mistake, but they’ve also identified a serious problem for the digital news ecosystem: Old content is a burden to carry [because it lacks a viable economic model], and intentionally or not, Google isn’t making that lift any easier.

kedean• 3 years ago

you can't fault a lot of non-bonsai trees for considering how they might qualify.

I will 100% fault them for acting on it. Just like I'll fault a company for choosing terrible single use plastics that increase their bottom line a bit, and companies that use AI to reduce head count. You can disagree with a decision even if you understand why it was made.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

The main argument here is probably that news sites should have some obligation to the historical record. Normal product companies should arguably archive old product documentation in some form but relatively few would argue that they shouldn't regularly prune marketing literature, whitepapers, and other information that gets stale and is in the way of finding current stuff.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

A news website is not a bonsai tree

well said

If the big box store's garden center only sells bonsai trees, then all of the growers will switch to bonsai trees.

Google is the big box store of the internet.

cfiggers• 3 years ago

Sure, and I agree. But also, CNET has gotten more attention because of this stunt than anything else in the last decade because people WON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. So while this technique probably won't help anyone else the same way, for CNET specifically I bet this has absolutely increased their Google traffic.

worrycue• 3 years ago

Will it though? I don’t visit CNET and I still won’t. Google isn’t going to rank any of their articles higher.

janesvilleseo• 3 years ago

It helps them by generating a ton of links and mentions which Google still uses as a signal for authority. Getting high quality links from all sorts of places around the web is worth its weight in gold. So with these new links it will help to improve their rankings for a wide variety of keywords.

rpgbr2• 3 years ago

This isn't the kind of attention a (allegedly) journalism outlet benefits from.

jader201• 3 years ago

people WON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT

Maybe this is anecdotal on my part, but I’ve heard nothing else about this since the initial article [1], then this — by the same author.

On the other hand, maybe it’s anecdotal on your part, and not really that many people care, besides maybe this one author.

has absolutely increased their Google traffic

I really doubt it, unless you have something to back the claim up.

But even if so, this type of attention won’t sustain, and long term, it will likely only hurt them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107149

loonginthetooth• 3 years ago

I don't know much about SEO or content pruning, so I make no judgment on the conclusion of this article.

What I can say is that this is genuinely one of the worst-written pieces I've ever read. Nowhere does the author provide any sort of argument for their conclusion. At no point during that long, rambling rant did the author give a single reason why we should agree with them, nor did they propose alternative solutions to the problem that CNET is facing.

If this were written for a high-school english class it would receive a failing grade.

TZubiri2• 3 years ago

It also displays a hilarious real live instance of the metaforgotten trope.

"A good marriage is like an orange"

nocoiner• 3 years ago

By any chance, did you stop reading at the transition that looks awfully like the beginning of an ad box or some sort of call to action for whatever they’re presumably selling? The article actually continues and somewhat substantiates it’s argument, but I agree if you read only what appears to be the main body of the article, there’s very little there.

The whole thing isn’t terrific either, but the page layout further detracts.

phowat• 3 years ago

Even if this strategy is good in terms of seo, they could have just archived those articles on a different domain.

layer8• 3 years ago

I wonder if also adding a redirect would still incur an SEO penalty.

pineconewarrior• 3 years ago

Yes, sortof. 'Crawl budget' issues.

mminer237• 3 years ago

Can they not just noindex them?

adzicg2• 3 years ago

one aspect of this that's overlooked in the discussion is how google penalises pages for bad core web vitals. instead of marking a single page bad and reducing its ranking, google decides using some weird algorithm to bundle a bunch of pages together into a group and penalise them based on the average core vitals metrics in the group. this would explain easily why old content is not worth keeping around. older pages might not be optimised for current web vitals metrics, but they can bring down stuff you care about a lot.

SEO is black magic and astrology, so there's a lot of guessing going around, but I think I can vouch for this as this particular issue happened to one of the sites I maintain, and it caused the homepage to lose lots of traffic because it was bundled as related with some ancient blog posts. the homepage performed quite well according to all the metrics, but old pages did not, and until Google started penalising groups last year it didn't make a difference to keep the old pages around. Since they started penalising random groups, something that's important can be affected by something old and irrelevant, and the feedback loop is very slow.

It takes 28 days to get feedback from the web console about any potential changes to page performance, so I tried fixing the old pages in a few ways, then just gave up and deleted them. the average rose up, the penalty to the whole group was gone, and the homepage again started getting a decent amount of traffic.

Zambyte13• 3 years ago

We should not be optimizing for search engines. We should be optimizing for humans. If Google wants to shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to show their users the content they're looking for, let them. Don't let Google drag you down with them by encouraging you to make your site worse.

thfuran• 3 years ago

And how do you propose making that happen?

dragontamer4• 3 years ago

That's all good in theory and all, but we all know that the #1 step of most humans is to type a search into Google, and that Humans refuse to look at anything outside the top page of hits (maybe the first ~5 entries).

The name of the game, if you're trying to serve humans, is to get to the top ~5 entries on Google.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

That sounds instead like optimizing your car for the parking lot. If Google doesn't see your site, you've got to put 100x the effort into marketing that site.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

older pages might not be optimised for current web vitals metrics

For news sites that's unlikely to be the reason.

Generally speaking, old online pages are the same as new online pages, because all the article content is just pulled from a database, a CMS. All the rest of the page (menu, ads, footer, etc.) is modern and kept up-to-date. It's not like an article from 2007 is using the same HTML that it was in 2007.

Just because on your personal blog, you'd left old blog pages on some ancient clunky Wordpress (?) version, that isn't how large publishing sites operate.

Tijdreiziger• 3 years ago

Not always true – see e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/23394.stm

lolinder4• 3 years ago

A large website wants to have its current content cached as much as possible—ideally very few users should be hitting the CMS directly—but it doesn't make sense to cache content from 1995 on the off chance that today is the day someone needs it. In fact, to speed up database performance on your current content it may even make sense to store your archives in a different, less beefy database.

However, if Google penalizes slow performance on any page, even archives, these strategies could damage your search rankings even for your current content.

adzicg2• 3 years ago

It’a not that simple. Older content might not have webp images variants available, or styling might be optimised for newer stuff and cause old pages to reflow, and many other things like that.

Key web vitals change over time and it’s often a mix of content, styling and scripting that needs to be optimised to fix CVW issues. Revisiting old content and rebuilding old assets might not be worth it.

I’m not talking from a perspective of maintaining a personal blog, but a product web site that currently gets about 1.5 million visits from organic search per month. It’s not CNET, granted, but not a trivial site either.

mattigames• 3 years ago

A lot of CMS software allowed you to add custom HTML, so there are hundreds of thousands of images with "float:left" hardcoded among many other deprecated HTML stuff that Google Search doesn't like.

A_D_E_P_T• 3 years ago

Google's relationship with blogs is downright schizophrenic.

So it seems you can be penalized for keeping old content around. You're also penalized for not generating and updating new content all the damn time.

The marketing guys I work with are always on my case about this.

"We need new content!"

"We have nothing to say on our corporate website that people will want to read."

"It doesn't matter. Write stuff anyway, for SEO."

"You're not going to get me to publish blogspam just because you think it's what Google wants."

"B-but you don't understand! You need to. Everybody else is doing it!"

slashdev• 3 years ago

Fortunately LLMs should end this idea of ranking content. It’s going to poison the well so badly search engines will have to rank on everything but content. Except links already proved too spammy and Google had to change gears to prioritize content. I wonder where that leaves them now.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

I don’t have SEO expertise but I did dabble in it a little bit on a need to basis and listened to a few experts, etc.

And the people dismissing the idea that pruning older pages has no SEO benefit don’t know what they’re talking about because frankly the only way to know if it does or doesn’t have an effect is to try it.

Also, there seems to be a segment of people laughing at CNET because Google explicitly says this will not benefit. Well, these people know even less because Google absolutely lies. Both by making knowingly false statements but more so by making statements which are correct by the letter but not the spirit.

So, for example, Google might say it does not penalize a site for having too many older pages at all. And this may be true (or it may not, but let’s assume it’s true.

But it’s entirely possible that eliminating older pages does improve CNET’s SEO scores. It’s entirely possible that while Google does not penalize old pages, it penalizes websites that have a lot of pages that look similar. So, for example, CNET probably had 15 articles which sound very similar for each version of the iPhone that is released. They have a bunch of review articles for different products in the same category thst look very similar. They have articles comparing the 2021 Lenovo with the 2023 model that looks similar.

And Google’s algo May start thinking it’s an SEO targeting content farm and hurt CNET’s SEO score accordingly.

travisporter• 3 years ago

How the hell did we get here? Were Microsoft and oracle and all these super rich tech giants asleep when Google was eating their lunch? Facebook too. It’s nuts

adventured2• 3 years ago

No, almost everybody saw Google rising. Their capture of the search market and the relatively quick translation of sales from that was a very prominent event in tech circles. And Facebook wasn't relevant during the initial establishment and rise of Google (Facebook's first billion dollar sales year was 2010, 12 years after the founding of Google).

Steve Ballmer (then CEO of Microsoft) swore he'd kill Google and bury Eric Schmidt - this is 2005 or earlier. Google's sales for 2004 for reference were $3.18 billion (for Alphabet now it's $282 billion).

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2005/09/1106/

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/court-docs-ballmer-v...

ranting-moth• 3 years ago

I think Oracle is/was run by salespeople. They wanted you to pay a fortune for a database. Even if you could use a free database, they wanted you to pay a fortune for theirs. Because theirs could do a barrel roll and a hand-stand at the same time.

Then of course when sales went down, you can always threat and extort your current customers: https://archive.is/Tbvw0

Microsoft just wanted to protect their windows thingy and pretend the internet didn't exists. They couldn't so they tried to embugger it. Once they had dominating market share with IE6, they simply said they weren't making money on IE and weren't going to update it any more. So they left it bug ridden for 5 years until the next release.

Google shows up, with all their bondage and evil intentions carefully wrapped in satin and free beer on tap. But now the beer is finished and the satin is worn out. Everybody is hungover and tied up. The sounds coming from the next room is like something is being strapped on.

Karellen• 3 years ago

The thing is, even though I distrust Google a lot, I distrust Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook even less. Even if Bing got 2x better than Google at being able to show me what I actually wanted to find, I'd probably prefer Google for quite some time before even thinking of giving Bing a shot.

For all I know, they do have better search engines than Google right now. But also, fuck those guys.

Discussing CNET’s content-pruning to improve SEO ranking

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