[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Suppose CNET published an article about LK99 a week ago, then they published another article an hour ago. If Google hasn’t indexed the new article yet, won’t CNET rank lower on a search for “LK99” because the only matching page is a week old?

If by pruning old content, CNET can get its new articles in the results faster, it seems this would get CNET higher rankings and more traffic. Google doesn’t need to have a ranking system directly measuring the average age of content on the site for the net effect of Google’s systems to produce that effect. “Indexing and ranking are two different things” is an important implementation detail, but CNET cares about the outcome, which is whether they can show up at the top of the results page.

>If you have a huge site, similarly, we might not get all your pages. Potentially, if you remove some, we might get more to index. Or maybe not, because we also try to index pages as they seem to need to be indexed.

The answer is phrased like a denial, but it’s all caveated by the uncertainty communicated here. Which, like in the quote from CNET, could determine whether Google effectively considers the articles they are publishing “fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results”.

[dannysullivan]

You're asking about freshness, not oldness. IE: we have systems that are designed to show fresh content, relatively speaking -- matter of days. It's not the same as "this article is from 2005 so it's old don't show it." And it's also not what is being generally being discussed in getting rid of "old" content. And also, especially for sites publishing a lot of fresh content, we get that really fast already. It's essential part of how we gather news links, for example. And and and -- even with freshness, it's not "newest article ranks first" because we have systems that try to show the original "fresh" content or sometimes a slightly older piece is still more relevant. Here's a page that explains more ranking systems we have that deal with both original content and fresh content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...