[karaterobot]

But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.

[jtbayly]

But “for 2022” is a guarantee that the content is bad if it hasn’t changed in 2022.

And yet, I don’t see how Google can automate checking this. It’s possible to add a couple of sentences about how you’ve not seen anything to change your mind about last year’s recommendations. That may well be true. Or false. How can Google know? It just sees content that has changed. So it has been updated in 2022.

The bigger issue is brand trust (as a reviewer brand). The NYT bought Wirecutter, I think, because it had established itself as a trustworthy brand. That’s in direct line with the reputation the NYT wants to have as a whole.

[ziml77]

I hate how true your second paragraph is. Google should punish sites that change the date without updating the content, but all the SEO spam is just going to automate changing content when it changes the date. And then what does Google do? Figure out how to make an AI that can understand all the indexed content and accurately determine if it's truthful?

That seems fundamentally impossible without defining trusted sources. But then that means that you're trusting that Google's trusted sources are good. And if you do think they're good, then why not just check those sources directly?

The only answer I have is to find your own sources that you trust and go to them first.

[b112]

But if the title is spam, and the content is good

Then the content would not need to be spam, to be high ranking.

Not if google just cared about content quality.

So in this scenario, where only quality counts for rankings, all a spammy title shows, is the desire to bypass legitimate rankings.

Thus, it should be downranked.

Again, this was if Google legitimately wanted to rank good content high.

[zepearl]

I'm not convinced, in general I don't like this additional layer of "fiddling around" with the original contents.

What about the opposite, the title being great but the contents not really? Shall Google serve its own "improved"/"summarized"/whatever version?

Meh... - this reminds me of the snippets of text extracted by some websites that are sometimes shown directly in Google's results, which in my case were sometimes wrong because they didn't take into account the context of what was written in the original contents.