Old news reduces search results quality
News shouldn’t be kept on a website longer than one month. After that it only gets in the way.
As we have analyzed search behavior on a number of websites, we have noticed that news keeps coming up very prominently in the first page of search results. However, customers were rarely if ever searching for news. They were trying to find a product, get support, locate a procedure, see if there were job vacancies.
News is overplayed on many websites, particularly intranets. The reason is simple. Intranets tend to be controlled by communicators. It is only natural that you will heavily promote the things you do as a professional. The result is a homepage that allocates far too much space to news.
But news has an even bigger impact on the quality of search results. News loses its relevance and usefulness very quickly. In some instances it takes 24 hours, sometimes a week, but certainly after a month, most news is not just useless, it’s counterproductive.
Old news infects search results like weeds. It can rank very highly in search results for a variety of reasons. Customers are trying to find a product to buy it. They click on what looks like the product page, and instead end up on a press release page about the product. This really annoys customers. They don’t want the press release. They want the product.
Clean old news out of your site as quickly as possible. Remove news from search after a month. If you feel compelled to keep older news stories somewhere, bury them in an archive somewhere very deep in the website and make sure they will not be indexed by any search engines.
It seems almost contradictory to say that you should hide a page from the search engines, but there are times when it makes a lot of sense. Last year, I dealt with a specialist health website that was dedicated to researchers. It helped them get grants, team up with other researchers, etc.
But 90 percent of its traffic was coming from the general public. 95 percent of its email queries were also from the general public. Its small staff were completely overwhelmed. So, they began to hide their pages from Google and other search engines, and started using exclusively complex and technical language that only researchers would understand. Life became a lot easier.
On the Web, we often have the cult of getting found and of maximizing page impressions. Recently, I searched for “British Summer Time” and one of the first results was from the UK Department of Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. When I clicked on the result it brought me to a page that told me I needed to go to Directgov, another government website.
How much search behavior involves customers arriving at the wrong webpages only to be told they need to go to another webpage? (Or not given any directions at all?) How much of your web traffic is genuinely useful and productive?
When you strip out all the noise from the data what are you left with? Whatever you are left with is at least real. It would be better to create a website for the 10 percent of visitors that really need you than the 90 percent who don’t.
Paul Higgins says:
Added on March 2nd, 2009 at 10:19 am“Recently, I searched for “British
Summer Time” and one of the first results was from the UK
Department of Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. When I
clicked on the result it brought me to a page that told me I
needed to go to Directgov, another government website.”
The (government) web imitating real life, perhaps?
I was arguing (to myself…a worrying trait!) that, provided the out-of-date product news pages linked to the product page, all was fine. But you’re right - I want to go straight to the product; I’ve become accustomed to finding ‘news’ pages and following their links.
But even if a company sorts out its own site, in Google you’re still more than likely to find a product review page on a “review site” ahead of the manufacturer’s product page (unless you confine the search to the manufacturer’s site).
Jim says:
Added on March 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pmI have found that sometimes, an old news release is the only way to get the information I want. This seems to happen often with enterprise software, like content management systems. I go to the company’s Web site and of course one of the things I want to know is the price. Most of the time they won’t say; they demand I submit my contact info so a salesperson can start pestering me. But on several occasions I was able to find an old press release announcing the latest version of the product, and there was the price range I wanted to see.
So I don’t mind wading through old news if that’s the only way to get the info I want, but of course it would be better if companies would just provide it without making me jump through hoops.
Chris Sledzik says:
Added on March 2nd, 2009 at 8:45 pm“Old news infects search results like weeds.”
Most content management system allow you to define an “expiration” date for pieces of news-oriented content. You can even stipulate that after a month (as you’ve suggested, Gerry) the content item be removed from the site and placed into an archive. It’s an automated system, and almost inexcusable for content administrators to ignore.
I realize this is old news to a lot of people, but many content administrators don’t take the time to define these parameters. Whether it’s because they don’t deem it important or are just too busy, it eventually waters down the search results and becomes, “not just useless, (but) counterproductive.”
Chris Kincaid says:
Added on March 26th, 2009 at 11:01 pmThank you for the post, Gerry. I saw your presentation in Seattle a few years back and still look to your writings for insight.
To prove your point in analytics, I looked at the bounce rate for search referral traffic to our agency news archive — which contains releases dating back to 2001(!) For all but the last two years that bounce rate was 80% .
Though the powers that be feel it’s essential to keep old news around indefinitely for posterity, I shudder to think how many of that number represent frustrated searchers who didn’t get what they wanted. I guess the road to hell is paved with good intentions!