Content Pruning Controversy: CNET's SEO-driven deletion of thousands of articles

In a recent revelation, tech news website CNET has been found to have deleted thousands of old articles in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results.

This move has stirred up debates and controversies in the industry, especially in light of CNET's recent editorial strategies, including the use of AI-generated articles.

UPDATE: Content Pruning Case Study: CNET search data suggests it works.

CNET's Deletion of Articles: A Strategic Move?

CNET's deletion of old articles began with small batches but escalated rapidly, with thousands of articles disappearing in recent weeks.

The company confirmed the culling but remained tight-lipped about the exact numbers. The reasons cited include:

• Improving Google Search Performance: By removing or redirecting irrelevant or unhelpful URLs, CNET aims to signal freshness and relevance to Google.
• Considering Various Factors: Factors such as SEO, age, traffic, and historical significance are weighed before an article is taken down.
• Archiving Deleted Content: CNET maintains its own copy and sends the story to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications explain it in this way:

Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly... This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic.
In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site.

Google: Do not just delete content because it's old

Google in a recent tweet made it clear that website owners should not only delete content because it's old;

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This is also backed by Tweets by Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Google Search:

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.
If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page “isn’t likely to rank well. Removing it might mean, if you have a massive site, that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go, ‘Oh, now the whole site is so much better’ because of what happens with an individual page. Just don’t assume that deleting something only because it’s old will improve your site’s SEO magically.

The Gizmodo article that made the revelation also focus a lot on this, but I believe they misunderstand why many SEOs sometimes recommend content pruning.

It's not about deleting "old" content, but thin and non-ranking content.

John Mueller actually made another tweet about just this yesterday.

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The PROs and CONs of content pruning in SEO

Content pruning is a strategy that involves selectively removing outdated or irrelevant articles from a website to improve its overall performance and user experience.

While it can offer benefits such as enhanced SEO, website owners must carefully weigh these pros and cons to determine whether content pruning aligns with their specific goals and priorities.

PROs of Content Pruning:

1. Improved SEO Focus: By removing outdated or irrelevant content, website owners can enhance their SEO efforts by allowing search engines to better understand and prioritize the most relevant and valuable content on their site. This can lead to improved visibility and higher rankings for the targeted pages.
2. Streamlined User Experience: Pruning content can help declutter a website and simplify the user experience. By removing outdated or low-quality articles, visitors can easily find the most up-to-date and relevant information they are seeking. This can improve overall user satisfaction and engagement.
3. Efficient Site Crawling: When a website has a large volume of content, search engines may struggle to crawl and index every page effectively. By pruning irrelevant or outdated articles, web crawlers can focus their attention on the most important pages, enabling quicker and more efficient crawling and indexing processes.

CONs of Content Pruning:

1. Loss of Historical Record: Deleting old articles means losing parts of the public record that could have historical significance in the future. It may impact the ability of researchers, historians, or individuals to access historical information or references.
2. Negative Impact on Author Credentials: Content pruning could result in journalists or authors losing access to their body of work and hereby a lower expertise in a specific domain. A SEO parameter that's also getting more and more focus and ranking impacts.
3. Potential Negative Impact on Traffic and Backlinks: Removing articles without proper redirects or updates may result in broken links and loss of inbound traffic from external sources. It may also impact the website's overall domain authority and backlink profile, potentially leading to a decline in organic rankings.

Overall, content pruning should be approached thoughtfully, considering the potential benefits and drawbacks.

Things to remember when pruning content:

If it's done, these things should be considered from an SEO perspective:

• Content Quality Assessment: Before pruning, a thorough analysis of the content should be conducted. Metrics like bounce rate, time on page, user engagement, and conversion rate can provide insights into the content's quality and relevance.
• Redirection Strategy: If content is removed, proper 301 redirects should be implemented to guide users and search engines to relevant pages. This can preserve link equity and prevent negative impacts on user experience.
• Content Refreshment: Instead of outright deletion, some content might benefit from updates or refreshment. This can include updating statistics, adding new insights, or even expanding the content to make it more comprehensive.
• Monitoring and Analysis Post-Pruning: After content pruning, continuous monitoring and analysis are essential to understand the impact on site performance, rankings, and user experience. This helps in making informed decisions for future content strategies.

Content pruning might also to some degree be a thing from the past, where technical SEO had a bigger importance.

And although some of the PROs arguments for content pruning to some degree was backed by the Yandex leak, today's content pruning might be more about creating a stronger semantical authority through semantic SEO, more than to assist Google in indexing your website.

CNETs controversial use of AI in journalism

The scrutiny that CNET is facing for their content pruning practice is much likely a follow up on some of the heat they got for another practice earlier this year.

CNET faced significant backlash after using generative AI (without any public announcements) to produce articles, which resulted in factual errors and even instances of plagiarism.

This move was seen as a controversial experiment that raised questions about the reliability and ethics of AI in journalism. I covered the CNET AI-case more in-depth when I wrote about Googles upcoming Google Genesis platform for news generation.

• Critics accused the initiative of trying to eliminate work for entry-level writers

• Concerns were raised about the known inaccuracies of AI text generators

• CNET's editor-in-chief defended the use of AI, stating that all articles were fact-checked and edited by experienced editors before publication. However, it was discovered that the AI-produced articles still contained factual inaccuracies

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