Archived copies of CNET's author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles before the second half of July, but then the pace increased.
Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down.
CNET’s move is because Google search penalises sites that take down older copy.
CNET's senior director of marketing and communications Taylor Canada, said that removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly.
“Our teams analyse many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic," he said.
"In an ideal world, we would perpetually leave all of our content on our site. Unfortunately, we are penalised by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site."
CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," the document reads.
According to the memo about "content pruning”, the company considers a number of factors before it "deprecates" an article, including SEO, the age and length of the story, traffic to the article, and how frequently Google crawls the page. The company says it weighs historical significance and other editorial factors before taking down an article.
When an article is slated for deletion, CNET says it maintains its own copy and sends the story to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The company also says current staffers whose articles are deprecated will be alerted at least 10 days ahead.
However, there is a problem with all this. According to the company's Public Liaison for Google Search, Danny Sullivan said the idea is rubbish.
If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page "isn't likely to rank well. Removing it might mean that if you have a massive site, we can better 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." Sullivan wrote. "Just don't assume that deleting something only because it's old will improve your site's SEO magically."
CNET has been making all sorts of daft moves lately, including laying off staff and trying to get AI’s to write stories, which went as well as expected.