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? 谷歌的約翰·穆勒（John Mueller）在Reddit主題中被問到如何處理在流行文化發(fā)布網(wǎng)站上發(fā)布的舊文章的建議，該網(wǎng)站上已有近25年的內(nèi)容。當(dāng)然，答案取決于它。您既可以刪除內(nèi)容，也可以不對舊文章進(jìn)行索引，也可以將其留給Google處理。但是你該怎么辦呢？

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. 這個(gè)網(wǎng)站已有16年的歷史了，其中包含許多舊內(nèi)容。我無法想象從這里刪除舊故事。它是搜索，Google和SEO歷史的寶庫。我不想對該內(nèi)容進(jìn)行索引，因?yàn)槲业恼军c(diǎn)命令可能會發(fā)現(xiàn)舊內(nèi)容無法很好地工作。翻閱舊故事并更新那些故事？我看不到如何處理成千上萬的故事。所以對我來說，我要離開了。如果我刪除一些較舊的，寫得較差的故事，我是否認(rèn)為我的排名對于某些內(nèi)容可能會更好？是。但是我想保持現(xiàn)狀。

What did John say? Like I said, he laid out a bunch of options, here is what he said:?約翰怎么說？就像我說的，他提出了很多選擇，這就是他說的：

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. 真的沒有什么可繼續(xù)的。副手聽起來像是多年來無數(shù)收集大量無害內(nèi)容的技術(shù)“博客”之一。我的懷疑是，它沒有什么特別之處，并且在某些時(shí)候，我們的算法將（或已經(jīng)）對顯示該站點(diǎn)失去興趣。您沒有提到它的當(dāng)前狀態(tài)，所以我想您的目標(biāo)是進(jìn)行清理以提高當(dāng)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. 我的主要建議是將重點(diǎn)放在新內(nèi)容上（因?yàn)檫@可能會提高網(wǎng)站的可見度和訪問量）。關(guān)于較舊的內(nèi)容，我認(rèn)為沒有一個(gè)簡單的答案適用于所有網(wǎng)站，其中有些只是最終刪除了舊的，未使用的內(nèi)容，還有一些則試圖對其進(jìn)行改進(jìn)，當(dāng)然也有所有中間立場。就個(gè)人而言，我很高興能夠在網(wǎng)絡(luò)上找到舊內(nèi)容，但這并不意味著您必須保留所有內(nèi)容。例如，您可以僅使類別頁面編入索引，而不為文章編入索引（可能基于年度視圖或任何有用的度量標(biāo)準(zhǔn)）。這樣，如果有人想找到PS1的公告，他們?nèi)匀豢梢酝ㄟ^在標(biāo)題中查找內(nèi)容來間接找到它。

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. 我的猜測是Google不會對舊內(nèi)容進(jìn)行太多爬網(wǎng)，因此就整體爬網(wǎng)而言，您可能不會節(jié)省太多。在索引方面，我們還嘗試找出保持索引有意義的原因，因此很可能也不會發(fā)生重大變化。該網(wǎng)站的其余部分排名會更好嗎？假設(shè)主要是您的新內(nèi)容是排名，那么可能不是。另一方面，如果您有大量常綠內(nèi)容也帶來了很多可見性，那么我可以想象到，圍繞該常綠內(nèi)容進(jìn)行清理的站點(diǎn)將使它更容易被識別為有用。

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. 我知道許多內(nèi)容豐富，大型SEO和內(nèi)容團(tuán)隊(duì)的大型網(wǎng)站確實(shí)會花時(shí)間瀏覽舊故事，并更新，刪除它們或不對它們建立索引。

What do you all do?

Forum discussion at?Reddit.

From:Barry Schwartz