[HN Gopher] Discussing CNET's content-pruning to improve SEO ran...
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Discussing CNET's content-pruning to improve SEO ranking
Author : marban
Score : 129 points
Date : 2023-08-13 06:10 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| cfiggers wrote:
| 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.
| jader201 wrote:
| > 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
| worrycue wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rpgbr wrote:
| This isn't the kind of attention a (allegedly) journalism
| outlet benefits from.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| 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.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. Link rot is a cancer
| we should all work against.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Yes. Things should not die, we should all live forever, as
| bits and bytes
| ghaff wrote:
| 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).
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Websites get redesigned, companies go out of business
|
| these two things are not remotely the same. if you are
| redesigning your website then it's your responsibility to
| make the old links redirect to the new pages. if you don't
| do that, it's a broken redesign.
| telmo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > an anti-user monstrosity
|
| The web today has 6 billion users instead of maybe 50mm in
| the golden age you're reminiscing about.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Not necessarily 404. They could redirect (301) to another,
| better ranked similar content.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| travisporter wrote:
| 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
| Karellen wrote:
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| > A news website is not a bonsai tree
|
| well said
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Companies should be using AI to reduce head count whenever
| possible. Welfare should be provided by the state, not
| privatized. Productivity gains are good.
|
| What if people are put out of work by dropping single-use
| plastics?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _> 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| adzicg wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Not always true - see e.g.
| http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/23394.stm
| mattigames wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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_.
| adzicg wrote:
| 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.
| Zambyte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And how do you propose making that happen?
| Zambyte wrote:
| 1. Identify a target audience
|
| 2. Identify what that audience wants (by asking them)
|
| 3. Build what the target audience asked for if you agree
| that it is a sensible thing to create.
|
| 4. Tell the target audience that you have built your thing.
|
| Note that "target audience" here is probably not Google,
| but on all 4 points, SEO replaces "target audience" with
| "Google". Pruning old information is not something that any
| group of humans have requested besides Google.
| [deleted]
| abduhl wrote:
| Isn't the most effective way to do 4 to get your thing at
| the top of Google?
| Zambyte wrote:
| If I want to tell my mom something, the most effective
| way is not to try to sneak my message into some search
| result of hers.
|
| When I say "target audience" and "humans" I mean it in
| the most literal sense. The most effective way to tell
| people that you built something for them is to tell them.
| lolinder wrote:
| Let's make this concrete. Let's say you're CNET--your
| target audience is millions upon millions of people who
| are interested in tech news. What is your alternative
| strategy for telling these tens of millions of people
| that you have a new article on topic X?
|
| Note that only a tiny fraction of your audience is
| already subscribed to some form of push notification from
| your service.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > What is your alternative strategy for telling these
| tens of millions of people that you have a new article on
| topic X?
|
| None. I don't know tens of millions of people.
|
| Why do you think that CNET - a relatively small group of
| people - should have the power to reach an influence tens
| of millions of people, even if only in a small way per
| person? I don't think that's healthy for anyone involved.
| adventured wrote:
| The premise you're suggesting is only the most effective
| way to tell a small number of people (ie tell them
| directly).
|
| That's why radio, TV, newspaper advertising was so
| effective for so long.
|
| Even for a small convenience store, larger scale - mass
| audience, automated - advertising is almost always a
| necessity and a far more effective use of time.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If your target audience is a close set of friends,
| family, professional associates, or other well-defined
| community, then yes, reaching out _through that specific
| network_ is probably the best way of reaching it.
|
| Which in mondern parlance is what is being accomplished
| by newsletters, mailing lists, and various social media
| feeds.
|
| But if you're in the business, as in commercial
| enterprise, of reaching out to a large and _generally
| undefined_ audience, or are responsible for government or
| NGO services, etc., _general Web search is among your
| most valuable marketing mechanisms_. And _that_ sector
| includes literally billions of people and hundreds of
| billions of dollars worth of transactions or equivalent
| value.
|
| And manual outreach through a small group ... really
| isn't effective.
|
| I'm not saying that _your specific use case_ is invalid.
| I _am_ saying, as someone with a deep and abiding
| animosity to virtually all modern marketing, advertising,
| and SEO, that modern marketing, advertising, and SEO _do
| in fact have a place_. And that your comments here are
| largely asserting otherwise.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > But if you're in the business, as in commercial
| enterprise, of reaching out to a large and generally
| undefined audience
|
| I don't think people should skip step 1 in the name of
| making a buck. Having a target audience should be
| _critical_ for a commercial endeavor.
|
| > And manual outreach through a small group ... really
| isn't effective.
|
| Why do you think that?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Target audiences _are_ identified in mass-marketing
| campaigns, the term of art is _market research_.
|
| Your second question simply doesn't deserve a response.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| Zambyte wrote:
| My website is https://robbyzambito.me.
|
| Did you discover that from Google? Did you refuse to look
| at that link because it wasn't presented as a top 5 hit on
| Google? Are you not human?
|
| My point is that information can be propagated outside of
| search engines very easily. Every link on Hacker News is
| presented to you outside of a search engine.
|
| Optimize for humans. Tell humans that you made something.
| If Google doesn't want to service their users, that's not a
| problem you should work on fixing.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Are you seriously suggesting that manual word of mouth
| marketing over niche forums has the same reach as hitting
| the top 5 hits on Google through Search Engine
| Optimization?
| Zambyte wrote:
| No. I'm arguing that "reach" is not something you should
| strive for. Quality is.
| dragontamer wrote:
| That's all well and all, but CNET is an advertising
| supported website, so "reach" is its revenue stream.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Okay. And do you think that's a good thing?
| mattmanser wrote:
| Seriously, stop and think about what you're saying.
|
| These are companies looking to make money to pay staff.
| Not die on a hill of what they wish reality was, rather
| than what reality actually is.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| Seriously, stop and re-read the above. You think the
| current incentives are natural and we must accept this?
|
| No one is telling any individual company to do a specific
| thing in a vacuum. The suggestion is we re-shape the
| incentives we have created as an industry and society.
| It's about values, and we should bucket the discussion
| because the current batch of MBAs in charge at these
| companies, who will likely all be gone in 18 months no
| matter what, are focused on the immediate? Come on.
| That's not how anyone should determine what their values
| are.
| pessimizer wrote:
| When did the conversation turn to nature?
| mattmanser wrote:
| I've re-read it.
|
| There's no sign of that suggestion in this thread. The GP
| was talking about today, and has never mentioned huge
| sweeping policy changes from multiple governments around
| the world to make Google's business model obsolete.
| scrollaway wrote:
| If I were to elect you to be the new CEO of CNET
| tomorrow, what would be your action plan?
|
| Because so far it's not very promising, and "just let the
| company die" is not a strategy people are going to
| implement.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I would leave, because I do not want to be the CEO of
| CNET.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Ah yes, HN would be so much better if every company on
| Earth constantly posted links to their sites in comment
| threads.
|
| Information can and does get propagated outside of search
| engines very easily. That's the premise of huge
| industries like email marketing, social media, banner
| ads, and PR. Are these marketing channels universally
| beloved by humans? Not exactly.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I don't know why you think anyone suggested every company
| on Earth should post links to their sites in comment
| threads. I am not every company on Earth. I am me. My
| comment was meant to demonstrate me talking as me. Not as
| anyone else.
|
| I think the disconnect here is that you are assuming
| everything should scale infinitely. Ie: if one company
| posts, _every_ company should post. If one company sends
| out spam emails, _every_ company should send out spam
| emails. If one company tries to make their website #1 on
| Google for a given search, _every_ company should do the
| same.
|
| My whole point about talking to your target audience was
| meant to directly contradict this. Your target audience
| can only be a finite set of people, because you can only
| talk to a finite set of people. Otherwise, you're just
| producing noise and hoping someone will listen to it.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It will leave them in a tarpit of their own making. Google
| was useful only in a world where content quality mattered.
| loonginthetooth wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| It also displays a hilarious real live instance of the
| metaforgotten trope.
|
| "A good marriage is like an orange"
| nocoiner wrote:
| 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.
| jwilk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| phowat wrote:
| Even if this strategy is good in terms of seo, they could have
| just archived those articles on a different domain.
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder if also adding a redirect would still incur an SEO
| penalty.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| Yes, sortof. 'Crawl budget' issues.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Can they not just noindex them?
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