Last month (April), the tech giant Google gave advice to news sites about what to do with old content. Basically, a person on Reddit asked Google’s John Muller (Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst) for advice on what to do with old articles published on a pop culture publishing sites that has near about 25 years of content on it. Wondering about the answer of Muller? The answer was quite simple, he said, “it depends: you can either remove the content, noindex the old articles, or just leave it and let Google handle it.
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.
John Muller advice for old content published on website.
John Muller’s first recommendation is to focus on publishing new content because they’re what drive traffic & visibility of your site. He says many people end up removing old, unused contents, others try to improve it.
Regarding old content, Muller advises that you shouldn’t keep every old content on site. He personally appreciates finding old things on the web.
Muller advises keeping category pages indexed and noindex the articles.
He says Google doesn’t crawl old content much so it means there’s no point in keeping those contents that don’t contribute to site enhancement.
Muller also advises evergreen content bringing traffic to the site. He says if evergreen contents bring traffic to the site then it makes easier to recognize site for searchers.
After reading out the recommendations of John Muller then it’s clear that you can remove the content if it’s not producing good results for you. However, in case you don’t want to remove then read below to improve them.
How to improve the evergreen content?
Evergreen contents are no more evergreen now because with the time things keep on changing and people look for information that is updated or trendy. So read the below points to improve your evergreen contents.
We all know new information comes out every day and new things happen in the world which is constant in a state of flux. Try to add new information to your content and update it regularly.
Once you posted your content then don’t stop there. Make sure you re-post and re-promote your content on different social networking sites. When you do so you have more chances to connect with your audience.
To improve your old content and enhance the readability of it you must add relevant and unique keywords to it. Adding keywords to your content means boosting the site SEO of your content.
Nowadays people like to read content that has visuals, images, or short videos embedded in it. Here you can also include these things to your content to improve your content.
Final words
Content is king -this is the very famous adage that we all know. But it can go worthless if you don’t improve your old content time-to-time. What John Muller said is right, you must abide by his saying. He has already said that doesn’t stick to old content you can simply remove it if it’s of no worth otherwise improve it. Furthermore, if you’re not able to do anything, you can simply leave it as it is because Google will handle it.
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.