News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking. Parent comment

Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by hedora on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @11:04PM (#37071444)
The tweet is also clearly saying that deleting old content will increase the average page rank of your articles in the first N hours after it is published. (Because the time to first crawl will decrease, and the page rank is effectively zero before the first crawl).

CNet is big enough that I’d expect Google to ensure the crawler has fresh news articles from it, but that isn’t explicitly said anywhere.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by Twisell on Thursday August 10, 2023 @02:17AM (#37072567)
And considering all the AI hype, one could have hoped that the leading search engine crawler would be able to "smartly" detect new contents based on a url containing a timestamp.

Apparently not if this SEO trick is really a thing...

EDIT : sorry my bad it's actually the opposite. One could expect that a site like CNET would include a timestamp and a unique ID in their URL in 2023. This seems to be the "unpermalink" of a recent cnet article.

Maybe the SEO expert could have started there...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-5-rev...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by dannysullivan on Thursday August 10, 2023 @11:50AM (#37077732)
I did the tweet. It is clearly not saying anything about the "average page rank" of your articles because those words don't appear in the tweet at all. And PageRank isn't the only factor we use in ranking pages. And it's not related to "gosh, we could crawl your page in X hours therefore you get more PageRank."
[ Parent | on HN ]