How long does content stay in Google's index?

[virtualreality]

How long does content stay in Google's index? For example, if a company and its website no longer exists and all of the site's content was taken down, does Google retain the content that used to be published on that site somewhere? Archive.org keeps data for many years, but does it mean Google indexes that site? Also, can old content that used to exist be reused years after the original site went down?

[lucy24]

Do you mean the visible index that you see when you use Google search, or do you mean the hidden bowels of their computers?

can old content that used to exist be reused years after the original site went down?

Used by whom, where? It's an awfully general question. I don't know of any place where copyright disappears purely because the content is no longer publicly available, if that's what you meant. (Compare the case of "orphan books".)

[timemachined]

If you steal content from archive.org and the previous owner finds out, I don't know how they would go about it but it's not correct to do so. If anything, I get asked to rewrite content in a similar vein, which is different altogether.

If the site was yours, reuse the content, I can't see it being a dup problem from archive.org and if it is, show that you owned the content to archive and they will remove it. Perhaps they have terms on their site to that effect.

I have various extinct sites still in archive, I should perhaps rehash the content but never get around to it. Others might have more valued opinion and more knowledge however.

[FranticFish]

To ask the question a clearer way: does Google assign proprietary rights to the site it first found content on?

In my experience, no. Example follows.

A site I help manage republished an article from a reasonably popular site in the niche. Copy and paste job. I changed that to a stub article with a comment and a link to the source.

A year or so down the line the source had gone offline. I had a saved version of the article so I expanded the stub to a full article.

That was over a year ago: it still ranks and pulls in traffic for this site with the exact same content from another site that has since vanished.