Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is "not a thing!" as CNET erases its history. The tech news site removed thousands of old articles in a recent bid to appease Google and improve its performance in search results over the past few months.
  • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
    743·
    2 years ago

    Google is supposed (SUPPOSED) to serve up closest to what you search for. SEO is the antithesis of this - it games the system to get a given website closer to or in front of your eyeballs even if it’s content is less relevant. And Google has allowed this to continue (or more likely encouraged it on the down low because businesses that are SEO obsessed are more likely to be send money Google’s way) because Google isn’t a search engine anymore - Google is an advertising company with some internet services slapped on. Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies. It doesn’t serve up what’s relevant - it serves up as much results that generate it revenue as possible without being so obvious about it that users get pissed off and switch search engines.

      • ansik@kbin.social
        10·
        2 years ago

        I’m extremely happy with the results on Kagi. Setting up my own ‘page-rank’ with their search customizations is a godsend to get rid of any unwanted sites and promoted the sources I know I’ll come back to.

        I’m a bit turned off the pricing though, especially since last month I blew through 1000 searches before the end of last month so currently back to Google, but frustrated by every second search or so.

    • new_acct_who_dis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      2 years ago

      I do SEO as my day job.

      I’ve only ever done white hat, and it’s all about content relevance to user intent, creating a site that loads quickly and functions in an intuitive way, and is coded so that search engines can easily understand the site.

      Of course the goal is almost always to get you to buy something, but all it really is is best practices for online publishing.

      • oKtosiTe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 years ago

        Would you then class the pages upon pages of generated, useless content I get for most Google searches nowadays as “black hat” SEO?

    • evatronic@lemm.eeEnglish
      81·
      2 years ago

      Google ‘search’ is just a clown face for one of their advertising strategies.

      It also has a bunch of decent knowledge tools built in, if you know how to use them. I use the stupid calculator thing more than I should; it’s like a cheap wolfram alpha.

      • quicksand@lemm.eeEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Literally used that to subtract 37 today. Could’ve done it myself but you type it in Chrome and it previews the answer for free. Such an easy check. I don’t wanna support Google but they are at least pros at subtraction, and God knows you can’t criticize that

  • exussum@lemmy.worldEnglish
    371·
    2 years ago

    They could have taken those articles out of the sitemap and get the same results.

  • Savaran@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 years ago

    Jokes on them, now not only is there no reason to search for anything, but there’s no reason to go their site either.

  • Gramba@kbin.social
    15·
    2 years ago

    I wonder if this is why so many sites now started including previews of new content on old content pages. It’s made trying to google by date range completely useless because google now thinks a 12 year old post is brand new because there’s a preview of a new post at the bottom when they re-index it.

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      I’ve already noticed this being a problem. I search for a specific issue that’s recent. Set the search as past year or month. See a search result that looks relevant and the date on it (according the search engine) is recent. Click on it only to find its a 5yo article.

  • oforgetaboutit@kbin.social
    132·
    2 years ago

    This is because of Google’s monopoly on search. If there were more search engines, then sites would just focus on making high quality articles instead of trying to play with the monopolists policies

    • gamermanh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      …what?

      If there were multiple search engines (there are) then SEO would focus on whichever were most popular

      I’ve literally done work where SEO included making sure Bing was also optimized for, and I know others who have also done so

      More engines would make SEO harder and longer as we assume each engine would search differently, but SEO will creep into any engine that gets popular for the obvious reason of people wanting their content seen

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      4·
      2 years ago

      I don’t think they’re necessarily so much the number of search engines that currently exist (there’s already currently several) but rather that not enough people use the alternatives that Google had the monopoly. (Also helped by Google actively railroading users into its products and suppressing the competition)