Lots of armchair criticism of SEO practices here from people who largely don’t have experience in it. (Not every website has Gruber’s reputation and virality!) Skepticism about the SEO industry is well-earned, but it’s not good to take Google’s recommendations as the authority either.
So speaking as someone who’s adjacent to the SEO industry (not my job, but I’ve spent a couple of decades in publishing, digital media, and analytics), I can share a little detail about what I suspect is going on here.
“Content pruning” is a common practice, and largely includes taking out of date content so that readers can focus on more current and/or profitable content. This is routine for large sites, and usually includes updating out-of-date but popular articles. Also has the benefit of trimming the amount of content to manage - spring cleaning, if you will.
From an SEO perspective, Google will dedicate limited resources to indexing any given site (its so-called “crawl budget”). If you take down the pages that aren’t doing you any good because they’re unprofitable, Google stops spending resources on those pages, and stops sending traffic to pages that don’t make money. If you’re lucky and have better pages with relevant content, Google will hopefully send those people to those better pages instead.
Or, if your new pages aren’t so hot (or your SEO experts mess up somewhere else), and Google sends those people to TidBits instead of CNET - oops!
As for why Google says this isn’t necessary, well, CNET and Google have different objectives.
CNET and Google are both in the advertising industry, but play different games. CNET makes the most money on pages where advertisers want the most eyeballs - usually very current content. They can sell ads at premium prices for that content.
Google, meantime, specializes in selling ads on those “long-tail” rare searches that CNET could never get an advertiser to pay for. See, if CNET can’t sell a page to a premium advertiser, they’ll get a few pennies (at most) on that less valuable content by letting Google place ads on it via their ad network.
Google also benefits from simply having MORE content. That’s more happy searchers who are looking for oddball things in the junk drawer of CNET’s archives. That’s more content to train its AI models on, too!
But while that content doesn’t serve CNET’s interests, it is useful for individuals who want to comb the history of technology. So I’m very glad to see that it’s all ending up in the Internet Archive, and not being deleted forever.