The topic of removing or updating or blocking old content from Google is not new, and we covered it countless times. I saw John Mueller of Google comment about it again, this time on Reddit, saying, it is up to you to decide which of your old content is helpful and useful - it is not up to Google to decide that.
John wrote, "There is no upper / lower word count limit or target," so it is not about word count and he said this before. "So what's useful & helpful content is up to you to decide," John wrote.
Then he took his Google hat off (but is it ever off?) and wrote:
Personally, I find unique news archives can be useful, but I have no idea what content you're looking at. You could also take a hybrid approach and move them into an archive section, make the section noindex, and let people still find the content through internal search (which also lets you see in metrics if the content is - on aggregate - still considered useful by your regular users).
He added:
Something can be useful even if only a few people read it. Imagine if Wikipedia deleted all articles that were in the lower percentile of views. (And similarly, something can be useless even if a lot of people read it.)
Personally, I like to keep my old content available and I have really not updated much of my old stuff over the years. It is like a museum for SEO news. :)
Here are the previous times we wrote about this topic (at least the ones I want to link to here):
- Google: Don't Delete Older Content, It May Be Helpful Content
- Google Advice On Old Content On News Sites: Remove, Noindex Or Leave It
- Google: Don't Remove Old News From Your News Site For SEO Reasons
- Google: Don't Just Blindly Delete Old Pages
- Googlers Disagrees About Removing vs Improving Content For Google Ranking Benefit
- Google: Old Content On New Domains Is Okay
- Google: Panda Victims Don't Necessarily Need To Delete Old Blog Posts
- Google: We Don't Recommend You Remove Content To Fix Panda Issues
- Google: Pruning Content Never Should Have Worked For Panda
- Google Retake: Improving Content & Pruning Content Are Both Valid Strategies
Forum discussion at Reddit.
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