Google: Don't Just Blindly Delete Old Pages

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that it doesn't necessarily make sense to just go into your content management system and delete old pages after a certain date. John said "FWIW sometimes good, old stuff becomes interesting again over time, so you might want to avoid just blindly deleting everything over a certain age."

The context here is a bit more important because the person asking manages a coupon site where the coupons do expire and have no purpose or use after a certain date. Here are the tweets:

Site in question is heavily visited daily by thousands of users looking for daily coupons. Can we safely delete old stuff, or better to keep an archive, even tough old posts get no visits, no attention whatsoever since people just look at daily coupons? Thanks!

— Fernando Veloso (@velosofernando) May 13, 2019

If you don't want to keep it, then delete it :).

FWIW sometimes good, old stuff becomes interesting again over time, so you might want to avoid just blindly deleting everything over a certain age.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 13, 2019

So in this case, what would you do? I'd analyze the big coupon sites, see how they do in Google and see how you can do it better.

Forum discussion at Twitter.