37 points

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern Internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site," Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications, told Gizmodo.

Proponents of SEO techniques believe that a higher rank in Google search results can significantly affect visitor count, product sales, or ad revenue.

However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance.

It is perhaps another sign of how bad things have become with Google’s search results—full of algorithmically generated junk sites—that publications like CNET are driven to such extremes to stay above the sea of noise.

From time immemorial, the protection of historical content has required making many copies without authorization, regardless of the cultural or business forces at play, and that has not changed with the Internet.

Archivists operate in a parallel IP universe, borrowing scraps of reality and keeping them safe until shortsighted business decisions and copyright protectionism die down.


I’m a bot and I’m open source!

permalink
report
reply
7 points
*

Good bot ☺️

permalink
report
parent
reply
99 points

archive.org is a treasure

permalink
report
reply
26 points

Donate!

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Long time fan but suddenly hit with impassable captcha 🤔

permalink
report
parent
reply
40 points
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Link for anyone curious

There’s also this purpose-built one if anyone is only interested in the save functionality

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

does this actually help the internet archive in any way? as in are your local ressources used or ad revenue generated? i fail to see how telling them to archive everything you visit is of any help to them. other than you being basically a crawler, i guess

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
59 points
*

It looks like they misunderstand how to improve their SEO ranking

In fact, on Tuesday, Google’s SearchLiaison X account tweeted, “Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like “old” content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this. Older content can still be helpful, too. Learn more about creating helpful content.”

permalink
report
reply
22 points

TBH this doesn’t make me certain this tactic won’t work, Google hardly seems to know how their SEO works. They sorta intentionally do this so they can blame anything suspicious on their black box, “AI”.

permalink
report
parent
reply
28 points

They really don’t. They’re going to hurt their domain authority and back links.

It’s more valuable to make an update to past pages because Google sees it as useful content that is being maintained.

You’re supposed to make tweaks once a year so it’s not stale, not nuke yourself.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Yeah I own an SEO business and that’s not how any of this works

permalink
report
parent
reply
62 points

The Internet is not forever after all

Lmao never was. Shit you don’t want on the Internet will never leave. Shit you do want on the Internet fucking disappears all the goddamned time.

permalink
report
reply
15 points

Jesus. I long for the day we get rid of this cancerous companies that just ruin the internet with every day that passes.

permalink
report
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 18K

    Monthly active users

  • 12K

    Posts

  • 530K

    Comments