CNET deletes thousands of old articles for better SEO

[BL00DW0LF]

Summary

CNET is hoping to appear like it has more "fresh" and relevant content, by removing older articles from their site.  The articles are archived internally and at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.  When Gizmodo asked a Google representative for comment, they claimed pruning is not recommended, but SEO experts were quoted to say it can be useful in some cases.

 

Quotes from Gizmodo's article

Quote

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.

Quote

“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.”

Quote

“If you’ve got content that’s fallen off in traffic and ratings and search engines have deemed is not valuable for users, that’s content you need to look at,” [Chris Rodgers, founder and CEO of CSP, an SEO agency] said. Ideally outdated pages should be updated or redirected to a more relevant URL, and deleting content without a redirect should be a last resort. With fewer irrelevant pages on your site, the idea is that Google’s algorithms will be able to index and better focus on the articles or pages a publisher does want to promote.

Quote

“CNET’s owner’s decisions to lay off a significant portion of its news staff, lean in on AI for articles and focus on profits from referral links already tarnished CNET’s reputation, and now they are literally erasing its legacy,” said a former CNET writer who asked to remain anonymous. “Beyond the damage to historical records, this hurts every long-term employee that Red Ventures laid off, who may be relying on their clips in job applications.”

 

My thoughts

I think that if they had to do it , at least they're taking the right steps, including notifying the authors and archiving the articles.  It's just a question of how much it actually helps, and if the loss of the easily accessible articles is worth.  Probably any SEO benefits would be in the long term, not immediate - for now they intend to continue pruning.  It's rare if I encounter a dead link that I'd think to check an archived version. 

 

Sources

Primary reporting: https://gizmodo.com/cnet-deletes-thousands-old-articles-google-search-seo-1850721475

[LeapFrogMasterRace]

Oh cnet is still around? Thats neat! 

[OhioYJ]

12 minutes ago, BL00DW0LF said:

The articles are archived internally and at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

I don't know how useful this really is though.  Searching on the wayback machine is less than useful many times. Unless you are going for a very specific site, good luck.  Perhaps a better option would have been a second CNet URL that is dedicated these pages? Or Perhaps they could just not worry about it so much.

 

Google complains about stuff on my site every month when I get the reports about it, and at this point there is a bunch of it I just ignore it. These things are not what's "best" for my site in my opinion.

 

I can say with absolute certainty that if CNET makes their entire website around SEO, and exactly what the Google algorithm wants, it will end up worse than it is now.

[divito]

Being a non-SEO expert, what exactly is punishable with having old articles?

[da na]

 They must have wiped just the ancient or totally irrelevant ones. 
HP Pavilion dv2000t review: HP Pavilion dv2000t - CNET

As someone who restores old laptops, CNET is quite helpful in determining exactly what the specs were when new, since ironically HP likes to wipe their database of their models every like 2 months. Good to see many are still up

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, divito said:

Being a non-SEO expert, what exactly is punishable with having old articles?

Nothing really.

 

Basically there are 4 scenarios:

1. Too much low quality content, thus low quality ads, thus dragging down the entire CPM of the site

2. Too much duplicated content or permalink collisions, resulting search engines spending a lot of time-reparsing content that hasn't really changed.

3. The site could be dynamically driven in a way that it never sends information to tell the search engine how old the content is, thus google just wastes a lot of time trying to spider the site and eventually gives up from circular references

4. As per usual, ad-driven sites tend to be organized around maximum ad revenue gain, which is user experience hostile, and greatly hostile to spidering as pieces of content will be missing.

 

Like the entire purpose of the various meta headers originally, in the 90's was to give search engines information about what the page contains, and greedy SEO business popped up and just stuffed very word under the sun into them, thus the more meta garbage a site has, the worse it would rank in the search engines.

 

And that's just how things have been in general. If you do too much "stuffing" for SEO, the site quality goes down overall. Google may not say this is what is happening, and likely isn't what is happening, but the underlying logic tells us that the only reason garbage content ever pops up on the first page of google is because of keyword stuffing for unrelated keywords. Which is how a typo can sometimes result in google surfacing a bunch of garbage sites instead of the intended site.

 

At any rate. Sites like Cnet, PCworld, Toms Hardware, so incredibly useless today, and are no where near as useful as they think they are, since they were incredibly useful in the 90's. Consider that Toms hardware was basically the "Huffpo" of computer content of the time. And now even Huffington Post is irrelevant (it's now owned by BuzzFeed.)

 

So there can be some argument to CNet deciding to delete old content that isn't relevant (such as reviews of hardware that hasn't been for sale for a decade) as that content is basically just keyword stuffing for ad content. But I'd say that the content it should be deleting is everything they had ChatGPT write.

 

[Vishera]

CNET is irrelevant in this day and age.

[WolframaticAlpha]

Cnet used to be the verge in their days. Sad to see them and Slashdot go down the miserable way they have.

[StDragon]

On 8/10/2023 at 6:35 PM, Kisai said:

Toms Hardware, so incredibly useless today, and are no where near as useful as they think they are, since they were incredibly useful in the 90's. Consider that Toms hardware was basically the "Huffpo" of computer content of the time. And now even Huffington Post is irrelevant (it's now owned by BuzzFeed.)

Tom's Hardware is still a good site. It's a shadow of its former glory, but still worthy of visiting for their reviews. It's still relevant.