Do the engineers at Google even know how the Google algorithm actually works? Better than SEO experts who spend there time meticulously tracking the way that the algorithm behaves under different circumstances?
My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.
SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.
Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.
I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.
Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.
I work for Google and do come into HN occasionally. See my profile and my comments here. I'd come more often if it were easier to know when there's something Google Search-related happening. There's no good "monitor HN for X terms" thing I've found. But I do try to check, and sometimes people ping me.
The engineers at Google do know how our algorithmic systems work because they write them. And the engineers I work with at Google looking at the article about this found it strange anyone believes this. It's not our advice. We don't somehow add up all the "old" pages on a site to decide a site is too "old" to rank. There's plenty of "old" content that ranks; plenty of sites that have "old" content that rank. If you or anyone wants our advice on what we do look for, this is a good starting page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat...
There is. Which is why I specifically talked only about writing for algorithmic systems. Machine learning systems are different, and not everyone fully understands how they work, only that they do and can be influenced.
It's really hard to get a deep or solid understanding of something if you lack insider knowledge.
The search algorithm is not something most Googlers have access too but I assume they observe what their algorithm does constantly in a lot of detail to measure what their changes are doing.
My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.
SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.
Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.
I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.