> That only says that Google discourages such actions
Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content.
"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"
Nope. It says that Google does not ding you for old content.
"Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like "old" content? That's not a thing!"
My bet is that they don't. My bet is that there is so much old code, weird data edge cases and opaque machine-learning models driving the search results, Google's engineers have lost the ability to predict what the search results would be or should be in the majority of cases.
SEO experts might not have insider knowledge, but they observe in detail how the algorithm behaves, in a wide variety of circumstances, over extended periods of time. And if they say that deleting old content improves search ranking, I'm inclined to believe them over Google.
Maybe the people at Google can tell us what they want their system to do. But does it do what they want it to do anymore? My sense is that they've lost control.
I invite someone from Google to put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am about this.
Once upon a time, Matt Cutts would come on HN give a fairly knowledgeable and authoritative explanation of how Google worked. But those days are gone and I'd say so are days of standing behind any articulated principle.
In addition, if you want an explanation of how Google works, we have an entire web site for that: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/
So there's zero machine learning or statistical modeling based functionality in your search algorithms?
I guess that Googler never uses Google.
It's very hard to find anything on Google older than or more relevant than Taylor Swift's latest breakup.
This is not the same as saying that it doesn't prioritize newer pages over older pages in the search results.
The way it's worded does sound like it could imply the latter thing, but that may have just been poor writing.
With archive search, the News section floats links like https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html
Our ranking system with freshness is explained more here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking...
But we do show older content, as well. I find often when people are frustrated they get newer content, it's because of that crossover where there's something fresh happening related to the query.
If you haven't tried, consider our before: and after: commands. I hope we'll finally get these out of beta status soon, but they work now. You can do something like before:2023 and we wouldn't show pages from before 2023 (to the best we can determine dates). They're explained more here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
-George Orwell, 1984