In the memo, CNET says that so-called content pruning “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results.” Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.
These metrics include page views, backlink profiles and the amount of time that has passed since the last update,” the memo reads.
A comparison between Wayback Machine archives from 2021 and CNET’s own on-site article counter shows that hundreds — and in some cases, thousands — of stories have disappeared from each year stretching back to the mid-1990s.
Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the exact number of stories that have been removed.
Red Ventures has applied a ruthless SEO strategy to its slate of outlets, which also includes The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.
In the wake of that revelation and resulting errors on AI-generated stories, Red Ventures temporarily paused the content and overhauled its AI policy.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
Wouldn’t using robots.txt do the same thing without deleting content?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In the memo, CNET says that so-called content pruning “sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results.” Stories slated to be “deprecated” are archived using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and authors are alerted at least 10 days in advance, according to the memo.
These metrics include page views, backlink profiles and the amount of time that has passed since the last update,” the memo reads.
A comparison between Wayback Machine archives from 2021 and CNET’s own on-site article counter shows that hundreds — and in some cases, thousands — of stories have disappeared from each year stretching back to the mid-1990s.
Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the exact number of stories that have been removed.
Red Ventures has applied a ruthless SEO strategy to its slate of outlets, which also includes The Points Guy, Healthline, and Bankrate.
In the wake of that revelation and resulting errors on AI-generated stories, Red Ventures temporarily paused the content and overhauled its AI policy.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
cnet’s record is terrible. first they do crapware bundling, then have factually incorrect articles written by machine learning algorithms, now this
i feel bad for any writer there who’s just trying to do tech journalism
Seems like the real problem here is venture capitalists.
Ah. Not that I needed it, but now I have further validation for having added cnet.com to the blocklist on my private search engine.
They’re still on archive.org, right?
Hint…the answer to your question is in the article.
Yes