Google Downranking Old Content

Google? Older articles are down ranked? A guess.

Your post is from 2018, not very old and on a very niche topic. Look for the “google is forgetting the old web” article.

Maybe even Google feels this way, since they seem to have deindexed so much old content?

For a long time I assumed that google indexed pretty much everything it, and it was only a question of providing a specific enough set of search terms to drag up older content.But what you hint at might be more correct these days. They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. If you click the advanced search its "updated within" and the max timeframe is a year.In fact it seems the date range example doesn't even work:

Rumor has it that Google penalizes content with a date older than a year.

I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.

It seems possible these particular articles fell out of Google's index for some other reason than they are not indexing "old" stuff. That's kind of a big leap to make without many more examples.

I have noticed that more and more blog posts from yesteryear are not appearing in Google's search results lately. Is there an imbalance between content ratings and website ratings?

De-indexing old stuff might not be a good idea, but I'm increasingly running into the problem of google (and DDG) returning old and outdated results, I wish they would put more weight on recent articles, or at least add the option too. The time filtering options just aren't enough.

Honestly, it's about time they tweaked their algorithm to favor newer content in many areas. I'm tired of getting five- to ten-year old pages when searching on contemporary technical topics or looking for a workaround for the latest Firefox weirdness.