Putting old content on the index page.

Could this hurt me?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

On one of my sites, an internal team has programmed "Posted on this Date 5 Years Ago Today" which brings a 5 year old article onto the index page for the day.

While it is a cool feature for our visitors, I was concerned on how Google might view this: re-freshing old content that is otherwise buried in the sites calander archives.

Could this hurt a site which is doing fine as is?

Your thoughts?

[Robert Charlton]

I myself wouldn't do it.

I'd post a link to the article, with a custom written intro paragraph as a teaser.

How stable you keep your home page ahead of the article would depend on what kind of site it is. If it's a newspaper site, with a history of change, that would be less of a worry than if it were a site that up till now has had a home page that hasn't changed much.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Oh, the index page currently has new (original, not scraped) content +/- every 10 minutes during normal business hours, 5-6 days a week.

[ecmedia]

Go ahead and do it - I doubt if it will hurt. Google cannot analyze part of a page. It looks at the whole page, which if it has content other than that old article, is much different from the article itself.