Google Advice On Old Content On News Sites: Remove, Noindex Or Leave It

Google's John Mueller was asked for advice in a Reddit thread on what to do with old articles published on a pop culture publishing site that has nearly 25 years of content on it. Of course the answer is it depends; you can either remove the content, noindex the old articles or just leave it and let Google handle it. But what should you really do? 谷歌的约翰·穆勒（John Mueller）在Reddit主题中被问到如何处理在流行文化发布网站上发布的旧文章的建议，该网站上已有近25年的内容。当然，答案取决于它。您既可以删除内容，也可以不对旧文章进行索引，也可以将其留给Google处理。但是你该怎么办呢？

This site is over 16 years old, with tons of old content. I cannot imagine removing the old stories from here. It is a treasure trove of the history of search, Google and SEO. I wouldn't want to noindex that content, because my site commands to find that old content would probably not work so well. Go through old stories and update those stories? I don't see how I can do that for tens of thousands of stories. So for me, I am leaving it. Do I think my rankings might do better for some of the content if I removed some of the older, less well written, stories? Yes. But I want to keep things as they are. 这个网站已有16年的历史了，其中包含许多旧内容。我无法想象从这里删除旧故事。它是搜索，Google和SEO历史的宝库。我不想对该内容进行索引，因为我的站点命令可能会发现旧内容无法很好地工作。翻阅旧故事并更新那些故事？我看不到如何处理成千上万的故事。所以对我来说，我要离开了。如果我删除一些较旧的，写得较差的故事，我是否认为我的排名对于某些内容可能会更好？是。但是我想保持现状。

What did John say? Like I said, he laid out a bunch of options, here is what he said: 约翰怎么说？就像我说的，他提出了很多选择，这就是他说的：

There's nothing really here to go on. Off-hand, it sounds like one of countless tech "blogs" that collect mostly harmless content over the years. My suspicion is that there's just nothing special about it, and at some point our algorithms are going to (or have already) lose interest in showing the site. You don't mention how it's currently doing, so my guess is you're aiming to do the cleanup to improve the current standings. 真的没有什么可继续的。副手听起来像是多年来无数收集大量无害内容的技术“博客”之一。我的怀疑是，它没有什么特别之处，并且在某些时候，我们的算法将（或已经）对显示该站点失去兴趣。您没有提到它的当前状态，所以我想您的目标是进行清理以提高当前排名。

My primary recommendation would be to focus on the new content (since that's what - probably - drives the visibility & traffic of your site). Regarding the older content, I don't think there's a simple answer that works for all sites, some just end up removing old, unused content, others try to improve it, and of course there's all of the middle ground too. Personally, I appreciate being able to find old things on the web, but that doesn't mean you have to keep everything. For example, you could just keep category pages indexed, and noindex the articles (perhaps based on yearly views, or whatever metric you find is useful). That way, if someone wants to find an announcement of the PS1 they can still find it, indirectly, by looking for something in the title. 我的主要建议是将重点放在新内容上（因为这可能会提高网站的可见度和访问量）。关于较旧的内容，我认为没有一个简单的答案适用于所有网站，其中有些只是最终删除了旧的，未使用的内容，还有一些则试图对其进行改进，当然也有所有中间立场。就个人而言，我很高兴能够在网络上找到旧内容，但这并不意味着您必须保留所有内容。例如，您可以仅使类别页面编入索引，而不为文章编入索引（可能基于年度视图或任何有用的度量标准）。这样，如果有人想找到PS1的公告，他们仍然可以通过在标题中查找内容来间接找到它。

My guess is Google already doesn't crawl this old content much so probably you won't save much in terms of overall crawling. In terms of indexing, we also try to figure out what makes sense to keep indexed, so most likely that won't change significantly either. Will the rest of the site rank better? Assuming mostly your new content is what's ranking, then probably not. If on the other hand, you have a ton of evergreen content that also drives a lot of visibility, then I could imagine that a cleaned up site around that evergreen content makes it easier to recognize it as being useful. 我的猜测是Google不会对旧内容进行太多爬网，因此就整体爬网而言，您可能不会节省太多。在索引方面，我们还尝试找出保持索引有意义的原因，因此很可能也不会发生重大变化。该网站的其余部分排名会更好吗？假设主要是您的新内容是排名，那么可能不是。另一方面，如果您有大量常绿内容也带来了很多可见性，那么我可以想象到，围绕该常绿内容进行清理的站点将使它更容易被识别为有用。

I know many large sites, with a lot of content, with large SEO and content teams, do spend time going through old stories.and either updating them, removing them, or noindexing them. 我知道许多内容丰富，大型SEO和内容团队的大型网站确实会花时间浏览旧故事，并更新，删除它们或不对它们建立索引。

What do you all do?

Forum discussion at Reddit.

From:Barry Schwartz