There is an adage that “Content Is King” on the Internet. And I’ll add to this adage that quality content is even, uh – king-ier.
There has been some confusion regarding the removal of older content from a website in order to please the Google algorithms. Some webmasters believe that older content equals low quality content and it needs to be removed.
This isn’t so according to the SEM Post, “It really comes down to quality. There are some amazing articles on the web that were written many years ago, just as there are many low quality articles published recently. So focus on the quality – if it needs updating, go ahead and update it. But if some would still find it valuable, and if Google is sending people to it, you would be making a mistake and actually devaluing your site if you were to remove it.”
This is especially true for “evergreen” content such as is typically found on Wikipedia pages, for example, as well as many other websites. According to Google’s John Mueller, if there is a LOT of older content on a website, then this could be adversely affecting crawl rate. Also, if the older content is exceptionally terrible, then this will need to be either removed or updated.
One sign that your older content is still valuable is if, according to your analytics program, Google is still sending traffic to that page.
So, whether old content or new, quality is still king when it comes to content.
References
http://www.thesempost.com/no-ranking-advantage-removing-older-content/
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6332384?hl=en
http://www.silkstream.net/blog/2014/07/content-is-king-bill-gates-1996.html
