{"id":40320,"date":"2023-08-11T14:50:54","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T18:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=40320"},"modified":"2023-08-22T10:46:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T14:46:59","slug":"cnet-deletes-thousands-of-old-articles-to-game-google-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/11\/cnet-deletes-thousands-of-old-articles-to-game-google-search\/","title":{"rendered":"CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

So speaking as someone who’s adjacent to the SEO industry (not my job, but I’ve spent a couple of decades in publishing, digital media, and analytics), I can share a little detail about what I suspect is going on here.<\/p>

“Content pruning” is a common practice, and largely includes taking out of date content so that readers can focus on more current and\/or profitable content. This is routine for large sites, and usually includes updating out-of-date but popular articles. Also has the benefit of trimming the amount of content to manage - spring cleaning, if you will.<\/p>

From an SEO perspective, Google will dedicate limited resources to indexing any given site (its so-called “crawl budget”). If you take down the pages that aren’t doing you any good because they’re unprofitable, Google stops spending resources on those pages, and stops sending traffic to pages that don’t make money. If you’re lucky and have better pages with relevant content, Google will hopefully send those people to those better pages instead.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

As for why Google says this isn’t necessary, well, CNET and Google have different objectives.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Thomas Germain<\/a> (via Slashdot<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots<\/a>.<\/p>

“Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic,” said Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications. “In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.”<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results,” the document reads.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Danny Sullivan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like “old” content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

A bunch of SEO types Germain interviewed swear by it, but they believe in a lot of really bizarre stuff. It sounds like nonsense to me. After all, Google also prioritizes authority, and a well-known website which has chronicled the history of an industry for decades is pretty damn impressive. Why would “a 1996 article about available AOL service tiers” — per the internal memo<\/a> — cause a negative effect on the site’s rankings, anyhow? I cannot think of a good reason why a news site purging its archives makes any sense whatsoever.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

It’s quite possible the consultants were taking them for a ride or are just wrong. But it’s also possible<\/em> that the SEO people who follow this stuff really closely for a living have figured out something non-intuitive and unexpected. Google obviously doesn’t want to say<\/em> that it incentivizes sites to delete content, and the algorithms are probably not intentionally designed<\/em> to do that, but that doesn’t mean this result isn’t an emergent property<\/em> of complex algorithms and models that no one fully understands<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Danny Sullivan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Indexing and ranking are two different things.<\/p>

Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don’t index all the pages on it. We try, but there’s a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn’t seem to change much, we probably aren’t running back ever hour to it in order to index it again.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

People who believe removing “old” content aren’t generally thinking that’s going to make the “new” pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include “old” pages they’re successful with, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

fshbbdssbbgdd<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Suppose CNET published an article about LK99 a week ago, then they published another article an hour ago. If Google hasn’t indexed the new article yet, won’t CNET rank lower on a search for “LK99” because the only matching page is a week old?<\/p>\n

If by pruning old content, CNET can get its new articles in the results faster, it seems this would get CNET higher rankings and more traffic. Google doesn’t need to have a ranking system directly measuring the average age of content on the site for the net effect of Google’s systems to produce that effect. “Indexing and ranking are two different things” is an important implementation detail, but CNET cares about the outcome, which is whether they can show up at the top of the results page.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

It would be nice to look at concrete data. Google knows how the CNET pages rank in its index, and CNET knows how its traffic changed (or didn’t) after the deletions. But so far neither is sharing.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n