News broke in geek circles not long ago that stalwart technology site CNET has been deleting many of its oldest articles to try to make search giant Google see its site as more up-to-date and relevant, and rank its articles higher in search. Gizmodo has the story here.
In short, Google prefers fresh content. When you have a lot of old content on your site, Google sees your whole site as less relevant, and ranks your content accordingly.
Google is on record as being not amused with CNET’s action. You’re not supposed to game your site that way, they protest. But Google stops short of saying that this sort of gaming doesn’t work.
That’s because it does. Or at least I believe it does. A couple years ago I did something similar on my site, and since I did, this site gets more pageviews from searches.
My site is pretty old at 16 — not as old as CNET, but still up there. It’s also far more eclectic than CNET, as I write about whatever I want. I like old film cameras and old roads best, and they feature heavily here. But if I want to write about history or cars, or tell a personal story, I just do it.
I wanted Google to see my site as being about film photography and transportation history, and I wanted it to see my articles as fresh and relevant. But I didn’t delete any articles. Instead, I tagged every article not about film or roads with “noindex,” which search engines interpret to mean, “pretend I don’t exist, and don’t include me in searches.” It was boring and tedious work that took hours.
I think it worked. A lot of things beyond my control goes into how much search traffic my site gets. But since I “noindexed” all of those articles, my articles about film photography rapidly moved up the Google ranks. Many more of my camera reviews are now in the top 10 results when you search for those cameras. Because Google favors fresh content, most of my reviews from the last few years are in the top five, My road-trip articles appear to have benefited as well, but not nearly as much.
Another thing I’ve started doing is updating old camera reviews and republishing them. I don’t delete the original review, but I noindex it and set a redirect on it so that anyone who finds that page is automatically sent to the updated review. Two of my oldest camera reviews are of the Minolta X-700 and the Kodak Retina Ia, both originally published in 2009. I refreshed and republished the Retina review last year, but I’ve not done the same for the X-700 review.
Because I’ve linked my site to my Google account, when I search for something that I cover on my site, I see a box in the results showing how Google currently ranks my article. Here’s how Google sees my Retina review these days. “Avg. Position” is where it has ranked, on average, for people when they searched for “Kodak Retina Ia.” Its average position is about 7.
My X-700 review, however, has not fared nearly as well: its average position is about 64.
Again, many things beyond my control go into search ranking. One I’m aware of is that there are a lot more articles on the Web about the X-700 then there are about the Retina. But before I republished my Retina review and redirected the old one, it, too, was ranked very low.
I dislike playing these search-engine games. I would rather my entire article archive be available for search. But I really want to bring more attention what I think is my most useful and valuable work, so I play the games.
After CNET’s action, the online commentary I read consistently wished that Google would not penalize longtime sites with lots of content. I agree, as it would benefit my (obviously much smaller) site as well.
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