Discussing CNET’s content-pruning to improve SEO ranking
tedium.co
tedium.co
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note that only a tiny fraction of your audience is already subscribed to some form of push notification from your service.
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.
I happen to disagree, but it's obvious that we're working from such completely different axioms that there's no point in arguing this further.
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.
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?
Your second question simply doesn't deserve a response.
Clearly it did, and quite a disrespectful one at that. I guess (and I have to guess, since you won't tell me) you think that because you can't talk to many people, and you think it is self evident that businesses should target many people.
I do not think that is self evident. I think instead of few people targeting many people, many people should target few people. You have probably heard that you can't make everyone happy. That's true. But it becomes less true the smaller the group that "everyone" is. If your target audience is a handful of people, you can make them all happy. You can even potentially individualize what you produce to meet the needs of specific individuals. You cannot do that when your target audience is a billion people.
Be nicer next time.
The name of the game, if you're trying to serve humans, is to get to the top ~5 entries on Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because so far it’s not very promising, and “just let the company die” is not a strategy people are going to implement.
"Okay, how?"
"You'll figure it out. Bye!"
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.
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.
I don't know if CNET is making the right call here. But I can at least understand the logic and thought process they went through, however misguided it appears.
The irony to this whole thread is that CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development, which is how they decided which content to prune in the first place.
Citation needed. I can tell you about lots of companies that have existed for years. That I never found from Google.
> Different goals, different reactions.
I don't know what you mean by "reactions" here, but I don't think that their goals are good if they end up making what they produce worse in the eyes of their target audience in order to meet that goal.
> CNET is actually highly targeted about their audience development
Some people are saying their audience is tens of millions of people, and others are saying their audience is "highly targeted". Which is it? Those two are claims are extremely incompatible.
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.
However, if Google penalizes slow performance on any page, even archives, these strategies could damage your search rankings even for your current content.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
"A good marriage is like an orange"
The whole thing isn’t terrific either, but the page layout further detracts.
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.
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...
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.
For all I know, they do have better search engines than Google right now. But also, fuck those guys.
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.
The web today has 6 billion users instead of maybe 50mm in the golden age you're reminiscing about.
Whether that is done on purpose, or is an unintended side effect of other ranking decisions, is up for debate.
well said
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.
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.
What if people are put out of work by dropping single-use plastics?
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.