[fshbbdssbbgdd]

This is the actual quote from Google PR:

>Removing it might mean if you have a massive site that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go “oh, now the whole site is so much better” because of what happens with an individual page.

Parsing this carefully, to me it sounds worded to give the impression removing old pages won’t help the ranking of other pages without explicitly saying so. In other words, if it turns out that deleting old pages helps your ranking (indirectly, by making Google crawl your new pages faster), this tweet is truthful on a technicality.

In the context of negative attention where some of the blame for old content being removed is directed toward Google, there is a clear motive for a PR strategy that deflects in this way.

[hedora]

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.

[Twisell]

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...

[dannysullivan]

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."

[dannysullivan]

It's not from Google PR. It's from me. I'm the public liaison for Google Search. I work for our search quality team, not for our PR team.

It's not worded in any way intended to be parsed. I mean, I guess people can do that if they want. But there's no hidden meaning I put in there.

Indexing and ranking are two different things.

Indexing is about gathering content. The internet is big, so we don't index all the pages on it. We try, but there's a lot. If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed. If you have an old page that doesn't seem to change much, we probably aren't running back ever hour to it in order to index it again.

Ranking is separate from indexing. It's how well a page performs after being indexed, based on a variety of different signals we look at.

People who believe removing "old" content aren't generally thinking that's going to make the "new" pages get indexed faster. They might think that maybe it means more of their pages overall from a site could get indexed, but that can include "old" pages they're successful with, too.

The key thing is if you go to the CNET memo mentioned in Gizmodo article, it says this:

"it sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results."

Maybe CNET thinks getting rid of older content does this, but it's not. It's not a thing. We're not looking at a site, counting up all the older pages and then somehow declaring the site overall as "old" and therefore all content within it can't rank as well as if we thought it was somehow a "fresh" site.

That's also the context of my response. You can see from the memo that it's not about "and maybe we can get more pages indexed." It's about ranking.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Suppose CNET published an article about LK99 a week ago, then they published another article an hour ago. If Google hasn’t indexed the new article yet, won’t CNET rank lower on a search for “LK99” because the only matching page is a week old?

If by pruning old content, CNET can get its new articles in the results faster, it seems this would get CNET higher rankings and more traffic. Google doesn’t need to have a ranking system directly measuring the average age of content on the site for the net effect of Google’s systems to produce that effect. “Indexing and ranking are two different things” is an important implementation detail, but CNET cares about the outcome, which is whether they can show up at the top of the results page.

>If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed.

The answer is phrased like a denial, but it’s all caveated by the uncertainty communicated here. Which, like in the quote from CNET, could determine whether Google effectively considers the articles they are publishing “fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results”.

[dannysullivan]

You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it." And it's also not what is being generally being discussed in getting rid of "old" content. And also, especially for sites publishing a lot of fresh content, we get that really fast already. It's essential part of how we gather news links, for example. And and and -- even with freshness, it's not "newest article ranks first" because we have systems that try to show the original "fresh" content or sometimes a slightly older piece is still more relevant. Here's a page that explains more ranking systems we have that deal with both original content and fresh content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...