Surely Google determines "fresh, relevant" content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn't change. If anything, doesn't Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as more authoritative and therefore higher-ranked?
This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actually isn't, it baffles me why CNET thinks it would be.
Google's suggestion isn't to delete pages, but maybe mark some pages with a no index header.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Alternatively, other than ads, what is changing on a CNN article from 10 years ago? Why would that still be getting daily scans?
i am tracking rss feeds of many sites, and on some i get notifications for old articles because something irrelevant in the page changed.
Wikipedia had a long tail of low-value content, but even the low-value content tends to be among the highest value for its given focus. e.g., I don't know how many people search "Danish trade monopoly in Iceland", and the Wikipedia article on it isn't fantastic, but it's a pretty good start[0]. Good enough to serve up as the main snippet on Google.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_trade_monopoly_in_Icela...
They’re just truly useful pages, and that is reflected in how people interact with them.
That's for stuff like large e-commerce sites with constantly changing product info.
Google is clear that if your content doesn't change often (in the way that news articles don't), then crawl budget is irrelevant.
It doesn't have to fetch every article (statical sampling can give confidence intervals), and it doesn't have to fetch the full article: doing a "HEAD /" instead of a "GET /" will save on bandwidth, and throwing in ETag / If-Modified-Since / whatever headers can get the status of an article (200 versus 304 response) without bother with the full fetch.
There’s some methodology to trying to direct Google crawls to certain sections of the site first - but typically Google already has a lot of your URLs indexed and it’s just refreshing from that list.
It’s easy to change millions of pages once a week with on-load CMS features like content recommendations. Visit an old article and look at the related articles, most read, read this next, etc widgets around the page. They’ll be showing current content, which changes frequently even if the old article text itself does not.
Once a site has been indexed once, should it really be crawled again? Perhaps Google should search for RSS/Atom feeds on sites and poll those regularly for updates: that way they don't waste time doing to a site scrape multiple times.
Old(er) articles, once crawled, don't really have to be babysat. If Google wants to double-check that an already-crawled site hasn't changed too much, they can do a statistical sampling of random links on it using ETag / If-Modified-Since / whatever.
Just a guess though.
No need to invent a new system based on RSS/Atom, there is already an actually existing and in-use system based on SiteMap.
So, what you suggest is already happening -- or at least, the system is already there for it to happen. It's possible Google does not trust the last modified info given by site owners enough, or for other reasons does not use your suggested approach, I can't say.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
I know it doesn’t make sense and that Google says it is not necessary. But it clearly worked for us.
I think a fundamental truth about Google Search is that no one understands how it actually works anymore, including Google. They announce search algorithm updates with specific goals… and then silently roll out tweaks, more updates, etc. when the predicted effect doesn’t show up.
I think the idea that Google is in control and all the SEOs are just guessing, is wrong. I think it’s become a complex enough ML system that now all anyone can do is observe and adjust, including Google.
Updated on <?= date(m/d/Y) ?>If the content deleted is garbage, why wouldn't it help? No clue on CNET's overall quality, but I don't have a favorable image of it. Just had a look at their main page and that did not do it any favors.
Second is there could be spam links pointing to old CNET articles that need to be wiped from CNETs site spam score.