CNET removes thousands of old articles

Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, reports Thomas Germain of Gizmodo.

Germain reports, “CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs ‘sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results,’ the document reads.

“According to the memo about the ‘content pruning,’ the company considers a number of factors before it ‘deprecates’ an article, including SEO, the age and length of the story, traffic to the article, and how frequently Google crawls the page. The company says it weighs historical significance and other editorial factors before an article is taken down. When an article is slated for deletion, CNET says it maintains its own copy, and sends the story to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The company also says current staffers whose articles are deprecated will be alerted at least 10 days ahead of time.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.