le warns CNET against content pruning after it deletes thousands pages

Gizmodo has published a article that “exposes” CNET’s deletion of thousands of pages to “game Google Search,” as they called it.

What CNET has done. According to Gizmodo, “thousands of articles” have been deleted in the last few weeks (CNET refused to give an exact number). CNET confirmed that it had culled the content. CNET chose which pages to redirect, repurpose or delete (deprecate), by looking at metrics like:

• Pageviews.
• Backlink profiles
• The time since the last update.

What CNET has said. According to an memo, content deprecation is “a signal to Google saying CNET’s freshness and relevance are worthy of higher placement in search results.” CNET could use some better guidance on SEO, but let’s not dwell on that.

Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of Marketing and Communications, told Gizmodo that removing content from CNET was not an easy decision.

• Our teams examine a variety of data points to determine if there are any pages on CNET which are not serving a significant audience.
• This is a best practice that’s used by all large sites, including ours, which are driven primarily by SEO traffic. In an ideal scenario, we’d leave our entire content on the site forever.
• The modern internet penalizes us for keeping all of our previously published content on the site.

‘Not a single thing’. Danny Sullivan of Google, through his @SearchLiaison Twitter account, , posted before the article was published.

• Are you deleting old content from your website because you think Google dislikes it? This is not true! This is not something we encourage. “Older content can be useful, too.”

Sullivan was asked what to do if old content is broken, no longer relevant or cannot be improved. Sullivan’s response:

• The page is unlikely to rank highly. If you have a large site, removing it could mean that we are better able crawl other content. It doesn’t mean that we say, “Oh, the site is now so much better” because of an individual page.”

It is not a thing. Google has advised that content be removed. A Googler gave this advice after Google launched Panda:

“It’s also important that webmasters know that poor quality content on a part of a website can affect a site as a entire. If you feel that you have been affected by this change, you should review all of your content and try to improve the quality of your pages. Moving low-quality pages to another domain or removing them could improve your ranking for higher-quality content.

This quote was from 2011. It makes sense logically because we know that some Google algorithms, such as helpful contents, are used to evaluate sitewide signals.

Other Googlers have said the opposite, such as John Mueller and Gary Illyes. They advise improving content rather than removing it. Barry Schwartz covered a lot of these topics on Search Engine Roundtable.

• 
  Google Advice on old content on news sites: Remove, noindex or leave it
  
• 
  Google: Do not remove old news from your site for SEO reasons
  
• 
  Google – Don’t just delete old pages
  
• 
  Googlers disagree about removing vs improving content for Google ranking benefit
  
• 
  Google: It’s OK to use old content on new domains
  
• 
  Google’s Panda Victims Do Not Need To Delete Old Posts
  
• 
  Google: Google doesn’t recommend removing content to fix Panda issues
  
• 
  Google: Pruning content never should have worked for Panda
  
• 
  Google Retake : Improving content & Pruning content are both valid strategies
  

Why do we care? I have found that deleting old content is good for SEO. I’ve written about it, spoken about it on webinars and conferences and done it myself. To be clear, simply deleting content won’t do much for you. However, you should include deleting, consolidating and improving content as part of your SEO plan because it improves your content quality.

Jared Bauman, Search Engine Land contributor, has written a case study on How to delete bulk content for SEO.

Do not blindly follow Google’s advice. Lily Ray is the head of organic research for Amsive Digital.

• It’s not always true that Google claims that deleting content alone doesn’t have any SEO benefits.

The article Google warns CNET against content pruning after CNET deletes thousands pages first appeared on Search Engine Land.