One SEO professional asked John Mueller about obsolete content on a website.
Their question was: I have a website for games. After a certain time, the game might shut down.
Should they delete non-existing games content or should they keep them in an archive?
What’s the best option so they don’t get any penalty?
They want to keep information about the games such as videos, screenshots, etc.
John explained that this is totally up to them. This is something where you can remove the content of old things if you want to, and you can move them to an archive section.
You can also make these old pages noindex so people can still go there when they’re visiting your site.
There are a lot of variations there. The main thing that you probably want to do, if you want to keep that content, is move it to an archive section.
The idea behind an archive section is that it tends to be less directly visible within your site.
That means it’s easy for Google, and it’s easy for users, to recognize that this is the primary content like the current content that you have.
And over here is an archive section where you can go in and you can dig for older content.
The effect here is that it’s a lot easier for Google to focus on your current live content.
It’s then easier for Google to focus on the live content. And to recognize that a section is the archive section, which is separated out.
Through this method, Google recognizes that the archived section is something they can go off and index, but it’s not really something that you may want to be found for currently.
This happens at approximately the 14:25 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Question)
I have a website for games. After a certain time, a game might shut down. Should we delete non-existing games or keep them in an archive? What’s the best option so that we don’t get any penalty? We want to keep information about the game like videos, screenshots, etc.
John (Answer)
So essentially, this is totally up to you. It’s something where you can remove the content of old things if you want to, you can move them to an archive section. You can make those old pages no index so that people can still go there when they’re visiting your website. There’s kind of like lots of different variations there.
The main thing that probably you will want to do if you want to keep that content is move it into an archive section, like you mentioned. The idea behind an archive section is that it tends to be less directly visible within your website. That means it’s easy for us, and for users to recognize this is the primary content like the current games or current content that you have. And over here is an archive section where you can go in and you can kind of dig for the old things. And the effect there is that it’s a lot easier for us to focus on your current live content.
And to recognize that this archive section, which is kind of like separated out, is more something that we can go off and index, but it’s not really what you want to be found for. So that’s kind of the main thing I would focus on there. And then whether or not you make the archive content no index after a certain time, or for other reasons, that’s totally up to you.
