Google’s John Mueller said something very true on Twitter, he said “Sometimes even posts from 2014 are relevant.” “The date is not the only ranking factor,” he added. But the issue is, the example given is really not the case and that article is really not all that relevant today.
Sure – when you ask for historical facts – old posts are 100% relevant. If you ask about SEO, yea sure – nothing has changed in the past 15 years :). But when you ask Google for the [best smartphone for product photography] a story from 2015 talking about Apple iPhone 7, which launched almost 3 years ago and since then we have had dual camera phones and even insane camera software like on the Pixel devices, yea, I think the date here is relevant?
Here is the tweet:
Sometimes even posts from 2014 are relevant. The date is not the only ranking factor.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 29, 2019
But in general, John is right – older articles can be just as relevant for some queries as newer articles.
Forum discussion at Twitter.