Should we delete this -17 answer that appears as an answer snippet in google search?

Question

When I google "can you counterspell a counterspell", google returns an answer snippet from the site:

Unfortunately, this snippet comes from this answer, which has a score of -17 at the moment, making it one of the top 10 lowest scoring answers on our entire site. This is obviously not a good "featured snippet". Normally, I would say "a score of -17 sends a strong signal to the reader about the quality of the information", however, the google snippet does not reflect this score, and if a reader does not click the link in the google snippet, they will never see that this answer is one of the worst performing answers on our site.

Deleting it should make it so that google's robots cannot fetch it for their snippet, so would it be appropriate to delete it?

Alternatively, if everyone reading this goes and provides "this is misleading" feedback to the snippet, it may just go away on its own.

Answer 1

Yes

The answer is wrong. Pure and simple. What a search engine chooses to show or not is a red herring in this case. At best it served as a catalyst to consider the answer but search engine previews should not really matter for the end result.

What does matter is the goal of the network providing useful information. And I cannot fathom how "wrong" can be "useful" given there is a correct alternative.

Were there a question (naive example) with answers:

Q: What is the result of 2+2?
A1: It is 4.
A2: It is 5.

Then I cannot see any reason to keep A2. Similarly, the answer discussed here is like A2.

Pyrotechnical says that the answer can be improved. I posit it cannot. It can only be entirely changed. That is not what on the network we typically mean by "improvement". Rewriting parts for clarity or correcting some supporting information - yes, but entirely changing the claim made in the answer - not really. At best, further development in time may require the answer to change drastically. If an answer was a "No" initially, it might become a "Yes" in ten years time. Yet that is not the case here.

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Still, if we really take it that the answer is improvable, then there is already a mechanism for that. The answer can still be deleted, then the author can edit and flag for a moderator to review and undelete the answer. Users with the privilege to undelete answers (20k reputation) can also vote to undelete if they deem the answer to be useful. Users with 10k reputation can see posts with undelete votes in the /tools section.

Answer 2

No - That's Google's Problem

Google has a faulty algorithm that is picking up the wrong answer. Google has control over that algorithm - we don't. We might change our policy to do something that works well-ish with Google's algorithm currently. But what if the algorithm starts creating snips for answers that have a -1? Or even only a +1, when there's a +200 accepted bountied answer to the same question that's short enough to snip? Moreover, what if Bing starts doing that?

We don't control these sites, so we can't guarantee that we'll actually be able to fix the problem anyway. Trying to do so now as a matter of policy (even going against our policy to do it, as Pyrotechnical explains) will result in our policy becoming Sisyphus, rolling forever up a hill to perfect search engine integration everywhere but never being able to achieve it.

Answer 3

No

Stack Exchange sets the criteria for answer deletion as follows:

• The answer is extremely low quality: There is little to no scope for improvement.
• The answer doesn't attempt to answer the question; it may be a comment or a separate question altogether.

Personally, whenever I conduct a review regarding deletion, I take both of those criteria very seriously. There are plenty of bad answers on this site, but not very many actually make it into the review queue for deletion.

I think a good reason for this is because the bar for deletion is pretty high.

Is the subject Answer extremely low quality with no scope for improvement? I don't think so. The Answer has a score of -17, but the breakdown is +3 and -20. The respondent also provided multiple comment responses attempting to clarify their point of view. While the community at large does not agree, this doesn't make the answer have 'little to no scope for improvement.'

Is the subject Answer a legitimate attempt to answer the question? Unequivocally, my answer is yes. Do I agree with the answer? No. Does my opinion on the answer matter for this criteria? Also no.

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Overall, our prerogative is to use moderation deletion tools in conformance with the site's stated criteria. Extending beyond that for things like search engine optimization is not something I can justify us doing barring a very good reason. From my review of the site's analytics, I can't see any startling data that justifies altering our current path (granted I'm not overly proficient in interpreting the analytics).

Answer 4

Although we don't need to do anything on account of Google itself, this highlights a potential gap for us to address in our Q&A collection:

• We don't have an actual question covering whether counterspelling a counterspell is actually permissible, or how it works.
• We don't have a clear answer stating “yes it is, here's how.”

I think we should address that by having a Q&A that, you know, states this. “Can I counter a counterspell? How can I do that?” Then people can learn from that, Google can pick it up, and we can reference it in the question we're discussing.

I considered suggesting that this question should be edited to do that. It comes pretty close: the question asks how to respond to it when this happens and none of the upvoted answers challenge the legitimacy of the events, and the answers that do are downvoted, which goes pretty far to imply things. But proving you can do that is a lot of additional work and a different topic, so that's a major scope change we shouldn't just slide in here.