The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.
1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.
Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
> Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.
I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…
I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
> and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.
1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.
Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.