Forum Moderators: martinibuster
At first I thought maybe this was just the natural way of things, that over time people would lose track of websites but that eventually they would disappear. Upon closer examination of the SERPs I found that a lot of these sites are, as you might guess, loaded with AdSense. Why would anybody get rid of a page that's ranking in the SERPs? Why bother to update the population of New Mexico when you could just create a new entry for each census and tack contextual ads on both of them. The more the better.
There's a time and a place for archived information, but I don't think content that has passed its expiration date should be there just to try to grab a few more clicks. I hope they begin to give more weight to newer documents in the SERPs, or add some kind of filtering option to get rid of older garbage.
Sorry about the rant, but it seems to me like there's a lot of outdated and redundant junk clogging up the SERPs now that sheer numbers bring in money more easily than ever before.
Why bother to update the population of New Mexico when you could just create a new entry for each census
Well, some people may actually be interested in the changes of such numbers over time, and not just their current value. (Just commenting on that particular example...)
Well, some people may actually be interested in the changes of such numbers over time, and not just their current value.
I wholeheartedly agree, and maybe that wasn't the best example. But don't you think the majority of people searching for "population of New Mexico" are interested in its current population?
Doesn't it seem more logical that a person seeking for changes over time should have to add more words to their query or look in some specialized archive section of the WWW for outdated information?
"New Mexico population change" seems like a more logical query, but since the example has separate pages for each, and most SE's limit the number of pages per site per query to 1, and because neither of these pages are talking about changes in population (and therefore wouldn't come up with the logical query), I don't think there is much of a defense for putting up more pages just for more pages, when a single one would do.
Why would anybody get rid of a page that's ranking in the SERPs?
Indeed. But this is the Search Engine's problem, not anyone else's. Only the search engine controls its algorithm. If the algorithm is throwing up outdated results, then the original authors of those pages can't really be blamed, only the SE engineers.
If the stale content didn't come up in the top SERPS, you wouldn't know it was there, would you?
For me it is totally acceptable to find a six years old document when I search for something like "tribe rituals in Africa", but when searching for "president of America" I'd expect pages about the current president to pop up.
Only by adding a lot of semantic knowledge in the search engine database the SERPs might improve.
Sorry about the rant, but it seems to me like there's a lot of outdated and redundant junk clogging up the SERPs now that sheer numbers bring in money more easily than ever before.
There are plenty of old, unmaintained sites that don't run AdSense ads, and there were plenty of old, unmaintained sites in existence before AdSense was invented.
I think Adsense is contributing to Page Mitosis - where a single large page is divided into two (or more) separate pages
If that's true, it isn't necessarily a bad thing. A common rule of thumb is that a page shouldn't exceed 2-1/2 screens in length, and at least one research study has shown that readers prefer to click between shorter pages than to scroll down a long page. If AdSense helps to cure "roller-towel page syndrome," Google will deserve our thanks. :-)
roller-towel page syndrome :)
On one of my sites I use very long pages. Reason is that the type of visitors of this site tend to print out the information and use it at locations where computers are not appropriate. Having one long page is more convenient for them and therefore I won't split these pages even if splitting would benefit my AdSense revenue. I also think that having long pages with lots of content increases ranking at Google. In this specific niche the top 10 pages in the SERPs all have pages with a length of at least 5 screens.
I know many visitors of my site read the whole page, not just the first visible part, because CTR on the AdSense footer ad-block is about the same as CTR on the top ad-block.
