Technology

archive.org is a treasure

It looks like they misunderstand how to improve their SEO ranking

In fact, on Tuesday, Google's SearchLiaison X account tweeted, "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. Older content can still be helpful, too. Learn more about creating helpful content."

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern Internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site," Taylor Canada, CNET’s senior director of marketing and communications, told Gizmodo.

Proponents of SEO techniques believe that a higher rank in Google search results can significantly affect visitor count, product sales, or ad revenue.

However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance.

It is perhaps another sign of how bad things have become with Google's search results—full of algorithmically generated junk sites—that publications like CNET are driven to such extremes to stay above the sea of noise.

From time immemorial, the protection of historical content has required making many copies without authorization, regardless of the cultural or business forces at play, and that has not changed with the Internet.

Archivists operate in a parallel IP universe, borrowing scraps of reality and keeping them safe until shortsighted business decisions and copyright protectionism die down.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern Internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site

Even if this is true, which I doubt, why not edit your robots.txt to disallow them to index it and leave the content up?

However, before deleting an article, CNET reportedly maintains a local copy, sends the story to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and notifies any currently employed authors that might be affected at least 10 days in advance.

People are freaking out so bad about this story. They're doing the right thing and archiving it before deletion. Settle down.

How many CNET articles from 2004 are you reading that you're getting this angry about it?

Jesus. I long for the day we get rid of this cancerous companies that just ruin the internet with every day that passes.

The internet Archiv Probably still has it and fuck them wanting to appeal to fucking Google search.

Money ruins everything.

All of the geocities websites I used to go to proved that the internet wasn't forever. Did anyone really think it was?

It's fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they're archiving the articles before taking them down.

To address the headline, though, I don't think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we've been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.

It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it'd been shared a few times.

Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I'm much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.