Does search spam age where the longer you leave it, the less offensive the spam gets? The answer might be no. John Mueller from Google said on Twitter "if parts of your website don't comply with our webmaster guidelines, and you want to comply with our webmaster guidelines, then it doesn't matter how old those non-compliant parts are."
So old spam, even on a portion of your site, off to the side, when the rest of the site is not spammy, is still against Google's webmaster guidelines.
Here are those tweets:
If parts of your website don't comply with our webmaster guidelines, and you want to comply with our webmaster guidelines, then it doesn't matter how old those non-compliant parts are.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 10, 2020
So if you've done something spammy a while back, forgot about it, but the other parts of your site are solid - you still might have to worry.
This reminds me of ages ago, literally ages ago, I published something on one of my sites in a subdomain to test some new spam technique. I forgot about it after I tested it, it was there for a few years or so. Then someone at Google spotted it and called me out, privately for it, saying the spam team found it. Again, this was ages ago, before automated penalties and the such.
But yea, if you have spam on your site, even if it is old and aged - it still can hurt you.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
