Comments on the website

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Hello, guys!

I have a 12 years old website. I performed some pruning of the content, and deleted a bunch of old posts.

But what about comments? Should I delete some comments from 2011 on the articles that are updated in 2023 and many times before?

I'm in the how-to IT niche, so all those comments are about software related things that are changed drastically since those times, or even aren't existing anymore.

Should I prune them too? Will be very glad for your advice or sharing some of your own experience. Thanks!

[aristotle]

Well it seems obvious to me that you should delete anything that's out of date and contains misleading/incorrect info. To provide bad information is a terrible dis-service to your visitors. Several times over the years I've spent a lot of time and gone through a lot of frustration only to finally discover that the info I'd found on the web was incorrect.

[tangor]

Look at the dates! Not saying anything "old" is bad, only that it is "old". One wants to be as close to "current" as possible.

Unless the site is an archive, legacy, or historical, get as new and fresh as possible.

Instead of weeding through the elder comments set a "fresh date", say "in the last 90 days", as your break point---THEN go through that content to remove any incorrect, misleading, or non-useful commentary.

Also remember the g and most of the other search engines give little faith to UGC, regardless of site or authority. Won't help SEO wise, might be of marginal benefit to site content as presented, but CAN be a drag on all the above if not curated to have ACTUAL VALUE for the USER.