[dannysullivan]

Hi. So I'm the person at Google quoted in the article and also who shared about this myth here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800

It's not that we discourage it. It's not something we recommend at all. Not our guidance. Not something we've had a help page about saying "do this" or "don't do this" because it's just not something we've felt (until now) that people would somehow think they should do -- any more than "I'm going to delete all URLs with the letter Y in them because I think Google doesn't like the letter Y."

People are free to believe what they want, of course. But we really don't care if you have "old" pages on your site, and deleting content because you think it's "old" isn't likely to do anything for you.

Likely, this myth is fueled by people who update content on their site to make it more useful. For example, maybe you have a page about how to solve some common computer problem and a better solution comes along. Updating a page might make it more helpful and, in turn, it might perform better.

That's not the same as "delete because old" and "if you have a lot of old content on the site, the entire site is somehow seen as old and won't rank better."

[Jiro]

Your recommendations are not magically a description of how your algorithm actually behaves. And when they contradict, people are going to follow the algorithm, not the recommendation.

[darklycan51]

Exactly this, not any different than how they behave with youtube, it seems deceptive at best

[mangodrunk]

Yeah, Google’s statement seems obviously wrong. They say they don’t tell people to delete old content, but then they say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking and also what content gets indexed.

[dannysullivan]

"They say that old content does actually affect a site in terms of it’s average ranking" -- We didn't say this. We said the exact opposite.

[mangodrunk]

Sorry if I’m misconstruing what was said, but then it seems that what was said isn’t consistent with what actually happens.

[micadep]

What the Google algorithm encourage/discourage and what google blog or documentation encourage/discourage are COMPLETELY different things. Most people here are complaining about the former, and you keep responding about the latter.

[dannysullivan]

No one has demonstrated that simply removing content that's "old" means we think a site is "fresh" and therefore should do better. There are people who perhaps updated older content reasonably to keep it up-to-date and find that making it more helpful that way can, in turn, do better in search. That's reasonable. And perhaps that's gotten confused with "remove old, rank better" which is a different thing. Hopefully, people may better understand the difference from some of this discussion.