<story><title>CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23826342/cnet-content-pruning-deleting-articles-google-seo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burnhamup</author><text>The theory I&amp;#x27;ve heard is related to &amp;#x27;crawl budget&amp;#x27;. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won&amp;#x27;t be indexed. So by &amp;#x27;pruning&amp;#x27; undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s suggestion isn&amp;#x27;t to delete pages, but maybe mark some pages with a no index header.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;search&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;crawling-indexing&amp;#x2F;large-site-managing-crawl-budget&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;search&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;crawling-indexing&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Is there any evidence this would even work?&lt;p&gt;Surely Google determines &amp;quot;fresh, relevant&amp;quot; content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn&amp;#x27;t change. If anything, doesn&amp;#x27;t Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; authoritative and therefore higher-ranked?&lt;p&gt;This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actually isn&amp;#x27;t, it baffles me why CNET thinks it &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>But as that linked guide explains, that&amp;#x27;s only relevant for sites with e.g. over a million pages &lt;i&gt;changing once a week&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s for stuff like large e-commerce sites with constantly changing product info.&lt;p&gt;Google is clear that if your content doesn&amp;#x27;t change often (in the way that news articles don&amp;#x27;t), then crawl budget is irrelevant.</text></comment>
<story><title>CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23826342/cnet-content-pruning-deleting-articles-google-seo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burnhamup</author><text>The theory I&amp;#x27;ve heard is related to &amp;#x27;crawl budget&amp;#x27;. Google is only going to devote a finite amount of time to indexing your site. If the number of articles on your site exceeds that time, some portion of your site won&amp;#x27;t be indexed. So by &amp;#x27;pruning&amp;#x27; undesirable pages, you might boost attention on the articles you want indexed. No clue how this ends up working in practice.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s suggestion isn&amp;#x27;t to delete pages, but maybe mark some pages with a no index header.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;search&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;crawling-indexing&amp;#x2F;large-site-managing-crawl-budget&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;search&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;crawling-indexing&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Is there any evidence this would even work?&lt;p&gt;Surely Google determines &amp;quot;fresh, relevant&amp;quot; content according to whatever has recently been published, which this doesn&amp;#x27;t change. If anything, doesn&amp;#x27;t Google consider sites with a long history of content with tons of inbound links as &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; authoritative and therefore higher-ranked?&lt;p&gt;This baffles me. It baffles me why this would be successful SEO -- and assuming that it actually isn&amp;#x27;t, it baffles me why CNET thinks it &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0cf8612b2e1e</author><text>Even if that rule were true, why wouldn’t everything in the say, top NNN internet sites get an exemption? It is the Internet’s most hit content, why would it not be exhaustively indexed?&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, other than ads, what is changing on a CNN article from 10 years ago? Why would that still be getting daily scans?</text></comment>