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Blogwashing

by sessy on 11/12/19, 11:37 AM with 112 comments

• by nicoburns on 11/12/19, 12:53 PM

  Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

• by geocrasher on 11/12/19, 1:26 PM

  If I wrote an article in 2015 and freshen it up with more relevant links, better writing, or some other thing, is it still published in 2015? Should I re-date it? Am I "gaming" the system by doing that? Or am I notifying my readers (all 3 of them!) that there is fresh content?

  This is actually a real question from me, and I'd love feedback. I look back on my stuff from a few years ago and the blog posts need fixing up, be it for SEO, for my more up to date 'voice' or because I switched to Gutenberg and removed janky slider plugins that haven't been updated since 2014. Should I re-date? Or leave them as-is?

• by pjc50 on 11/12/19, 12:51 PM

  Not a particularly detailed post and, as it says, it's an old SEO trick.

  But if people want an answer as to why the blogosphere is dead and everything's on centralised silos: this is why. Any decentralised system that doesn't take spamfighting into account from the beginning will drown under it as soon as it becomes popular.

• by mfer on 11/12/19, 3:43 PM

  The "freshness" issue is one that causes problems and subtly sets priorities.

  Problems come up when looking for older content on purpose. A lot of older content is very relevant still today. I know people who could not find something they knew existed in Google. Switched to Bing and it came right to the top. The difference was the way newer content was prioritized.

  Google doing this sets priorities. It says that newer is more important. Is that true? Many would argue it's not. Google says it is and "advises" people where to go based on that.

  I find these worth considering.

• by zafiro17 on 11/12/19, 8:54 PM

  Prioritizing new content is going to exacerbate a lot of already existing problems with the WWW. I won't echo the already good list of reasons why old content is relevant. But I will point out it will usher in a new era of re-showing you old content that has been repurposed "as new" via minor edits. And it's going to also help convince a growing audience of web surfers that only the latest/greatest is worth knowing about. That in turn puts additional pressure on content producers to obsess endlessly over SEO tricks and gimmicks. In sum, this worsens the user's experience by prioritizing things that benefit Google. And this, of course, should be no surprise to anybody who has watched Google's business decisions over the past 4 or 5 years.

• by rchaud on 11/12/19, 10:03 PM

  This is 100% Google's fault. They discourage both "old content" and "thin content", so guess what happens?

  Content writers create posts like "Ultimate Beginnner's guide to X in 2019" articles and just update the post title and "Last updated" metadata each year. Nobody's going to create a brand new guide to building muscle or whatever if the core information doesn't change year to year.

• by antjanus on 11/12/19, 6:04 PM

  I can't be the only one thinking that:

  1. it's possible the author double checks the content each year and redates so that visitors know it still applies

  2. the author updates the article to be current and redates it

  It's a little weird to say this is "blogwashing". It's pretty common (for me at least) to check the date of an article when it's a tutorial so I know if it's current or not. And I've seen this happen before where authors append a "changelog" to the article at the end so you know that it's up to date.

• by nickjj on 11/12/19, 1:08 PM

  How does everyone feel about only showing the updated date on the blog post itself but keeping the real / original published time in the meta tags?

  I do that on my site mainly to keep things less cluttered. Every post has an "Updated on November 12th 2019 in #docker #flask" line at the top of the post and that date is either the original published date or the last time I updated the content in the post, but the meta tags are always the correct values (ie. I don't refresh the published date with the updated date).

  But now it's making me think I should include both the "Posted on" date as well as a separate "Updated on" date in the presentation of the page itself to be crystal clear. My only concern with that is that will eliminate some vertical space on the page because I can't fit all of that on 1 line cleanly. I would have to break the dates and tags onto 2 lines. For example, this is what a current line looks like: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/make-your-static-files-produc...

• by codingslave on 11/12/19, 1:42 PM

  Search is just getting worse and worse, its a problem that probably nobody can solve with the current paradigm. I think in a few years there will be a significant opening in the search market for an algorithm that manages to structure information differently

• by ddevault on 11/12/19, 1:26 PM

  Another thing I see a lot is scammers scraping my blog's RSS feed and re-publishing my articles on their site, then filling it with adware. Sometimes the page they show to googlebot is completely unrelated to the page you get when clicking through.

• by ravivyas on 11/12/19, 1:04 PM

  Actually, a lot of sites keep updated posts with new information, which is useful. Which I believe makes it harder for Google to figure out who is gaming SEO and who are providing actual value.

• by WA on 11/12/19, 12:53 PM

  What? I thought I read somewhere on Google's webdev infos that they know when an article was first created vs. updated. Not sure if this "old trick" still improves the ranking of an article, but surely enough, it baits people into clicking on a link.

  I noticed it a couple times myself. Stuff that's obviously an older article appears in the SERPs as if it was published a few days ago.

• by jakobegger on 11/12/19, 5:17 PM

  Another great trick is just increasing version numbers in your blog posts! People look for content relevant to their version number, so you should just make sure you have copies of your content with all the version numbers people might search for!

  And with version numbers, you are not limited to dates in the past, you can even write articles about the future!

  Here's a brilliant example: https://gorails.com/setup/ubuntu/20.04

  How to set up Rails on Ubuntu 20.04, which will be released in April next year. You can already read the guide today! Some of the links might not work yet, because obviously you can't download Ubuntu 20.04 yet, but once it's released, those guys are bound to be the first ones who had a guide out!

• by vinaypai on 11/12/19, 7:23 PM

  Interesting that the text in the search bar in the screenshot says "AWS Pinpoint Alternatives" doesn't actually line up with the text at the bottom where it says "Searches related to Send with SES — AWS Pinpoint Alternative" and you only see 5 pages of results. The text at the bottom should repeat the search phrase verbatim.

  I get completely different results on Google if I actually search for the phrase in the search bar, with no sign of the blog in question. I see zero evidence that the scummy SEO tactic actually works and a lot more evidence of a faked "Google" screenshot.

• by wbillingsley on 11/12/19, 10:20 PM

  Frankly, I don't see a problem with this if it is done consciously rather than automatically. *

  Usually, I'm interested in currency not recency. If, say, a technical article was written in 2015, I don't exactly care that it was written in 2015 but do care very much whether it's outdated today or not. APIs change, etc. If the blogger has re-dated the article, that suggests they believe it is still current, which is useful information to me.

  (* - Caveat: no, I've never redated a blog article myself. But I am only a very infrequent blogger anyway.)

• by lessname on 11/12/19, 4:28 PM

  That's not just a thing done by blogs. Several "news" sites like (german) t3n.de do this. Or some sites like cnet.com etc... mostly content like "The best CMS as of {insert year here}" - so mostly things you can use years later. However, it doesn't help if the library isn't receiving any updates anymore. I don't think it's just to get a better search ranking but also to manipulate users (they want to use up-to-date software/etc)

• by jellicle on 11/12/19, 1:57 PM

  Vast numbers of people are currently employed writing/updating articles with titles like "What You Need To Know About Cats In Mid-November 2019".

  This is Google's fault.

• by stebann on 11/13/19, 5:19 AM

  Old way sharing is in danger when big guys like Google don't fight back spam and black-hat SEO. I try to do my search on different search engines so older content- sometimes well established articles on programming - and meaningful new content can both go to surface. Since four or five years ago if you search something with Google then sponsored content goes first, sometimes it's just brand propaganda.

• by PretzelFisch on 11/12/19, 3:31 PM

  I don't really see the harm in re-dating a blog to keep it high in search results. There is a lot of information that once publishes stays relevant and informative for years, to get dinged on seo because it is stale says more about google then the blog authors. Also they have an image which doesn't tell you if a links url was updated in an edit.

• by myrryr on 11/12/19, 9:11 PM

  Oh gods I hate this, when I'm looking for how to get something done on a framework which has gone under big changes, I need to look up the articles within the last 6 months.

  But this bullshit makes that really hard.

• by s_gourichon on 11/14/19, 6:36 AM

  Some Blog

  November 13th 2422

  This week, Groaar and Mrumfm have been experimenting a new invention. We are considering calling it "wheel". Will keep you informed.

  Comments

  This is old news. Our tribe has been using it for eons.

• by mikorym on 11/12/19, 7:19 PM

  > It's almost 2020... Google knows about this

  Google also knows about vertical search [1] and actively destroys anyone who pops up with a good new algorithm and hope for a startup.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search. I am pretty sure there has been a HN frontpage article about a couple with a vertical search startup that was legally and practically destroyed by Google.

• by dbatten on 11/12/19, 1:07 PM

  Am I the only one who still bristles when people say blog but mean blog post? Or is this generally accepted now?