Google’s John Mueller said he would not recommend that you remove old content or old news from your news site for SEO reasons. He said “I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.”

John said this at the 50:12 mark into the last video hangout this past Friday. He was asked about removing old news from a news publisher site for SEO reasons. John said it is “not something I would recommend.” He said “from that point of view I wouldn’t do this for SEO reasons.”

Here is the video embed, you can scroll back to hear the question if you want:

Here is the transcript:

I don’t think you would get a lot of value out of removing just old news.

It’s also not something I would recommend to to news websites because sometimes all the information is still
useful. So from that point of view I wouldn’t do this for SEO reasons.

If the reasons why you want to remove content or put it into kind of like an archive section on your website for usability reasons or for maintenance or whatever. That’s something that you can definitely do but I wouldn’t just blindly remove old content because it’s old.

The advice is a bit different from a year ago but not totally different.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.