<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>slater</author><text>Or mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn&amp;#x27;t penalize your ranking.</text></item><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>In fairness to them.  If one of their top ways of getting traffic is being marked as less relevant because of older articles, what do you want them to do?  Just continue to lose money because Google can&amp;#x27;t rank them appropriately?</text></item><item><author>jzb</author><text>This is some bullshit. It’s bad enough that a lot of sites with content going back 10-20 years have linkrot or have simply gone offline. But I am at a loss for words that they’re disappearing content on purpose just for SEO rankings.&lt;p&gt;If this is what online publishing has come to we have seriously screwed up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text>Who says this is actually improving their ranking? SEO is smoke and mirrors. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if this whole exercise was actually counterproductive for them, and they just don&amp;#x27;t realize it.</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>slater</author><text>Or mayhap Google et al could realize and understand that having old articles in archive shouldn&amp;#x27;t penalize your ranking.</text></item><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>In fairness to them.  If one of their top ways of getting traffic is being marked as less relevant because of older articles, what do you want them to do?  Just continue to lose money because Google can&amp;#x27;t rank them appropriately?</text></item><item><author>jzb</author><text>This is some bullshit. It’s bad enough that a lot of sites with content going back 10-20 years have linkrot or have simply gone offline. But I am at a loss for words that they’re disappearing content on purpose just for SEO rankings.&lt;p&gt;If this is what online publishing has come to we have seriously screwed up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jpk</author><text>Yep.  Also, the days of the &amp;quot;Advanced Search&amp;quot; page have passed, but Google still has time range options under the &amp;quot;Tools&amp;quot; button near the top of the results page.  If they&amp;#x27;re giving the user the option to filter results by time, then it&amp;#x27;s pretty goofy for the algorithm to de-rank a site in results where the the default of &amp;quot;Any time&amp;quot; was selected in the query just because the site has old articles in the index.</text></comment>