What you need to know

Fresh content can help you rank better in Google’s organic search results.

This is the proposition-you may have heard of it many times in SEO.

But is it true, false or “it depends”?

Please keep reading as we delve into using content freshness as a ranking factor.

Disclaimer: Fresh content as a ranking factor

New or fresh content on your website can help you improve your ranking because…Scientific?

First, let us consider freshness. One dictionary definition defines it as “recently manufactured or acquired or uncorrupted state”.

Well, you must consider how we define “recent” here, as this will vary from topic to topic. Or industry. Or niche. Or some other factors.

Think about it, how fresh is this article?

Did you read it on the day it was published? one week later? one year later?

Is it still “fresh”?

Other questions about freshness that we can think about and debate:

• Is only brand new content considered fresh?
• Does freshness only affect hot topics (news/events)?
• Will updating existing (aka, old) content make it “fresh”?
• Does user search behavior determine whether a query is “fresh” or “stale”?

Okay okay, that’s all. Where are we going with all this?

The point is that there are many misunderstandings about what is fresh content and whether it will affect your rankings.

Let us look at the evidence.

Fresh content as a ranking factor: evidence

Let’s start with the first and biggest question: Is fresh content a ranking factor?

November 3, 2011, Google Announce Improvements to its ranking algorithm. It said that the algorithm “can better determine when to provide more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”

However, when discussing this topic in SEO, the definition of what is classified as “freshness” will be different.

Google uses The query is worth fresh (QDF) Decide when to provide users with new information and when not to provide them.

Google divided fresh content into three categories in 2011:

• Recent events or hot topics.
• An event that recurs regularly.
• Update frequently.

In addition, Article 18 Google’s search quality rating guidelines (Version on October 14, 2020) Breaks down the types of queries that require “fresh” information. Those are:

• “Breaking news” query.
• Repetitive event query (for example, elections, sports events, TV shows, conferences, etc.)
• Current information query.
• Product lookup.

Some search queries need to connect to fresh content, while other search queries can provide older content.

E.g, Google’s patents related to freshness state:

“For some queries, old documents may be more advantageous than new documents. Therefore, it may be beneficial to adjust the scores of documents based on the difference (age) from the average age of the result set.”

Can updating your content improve rankings?

Yes!

Our Search Engine Journal team, led by executive editor Danny Goodwin, launched this project to update the old content and The number of pageviews increased by 2 times in one year.

How much old content do you need to update to affect rankings?

The amount of content you change on the old page does affect rankings.

For example, simply updating the title of an article from 2021 to 2022 without making any other changes to the content will not affect your ranking.

Google may ignore these changes completely.

Google statement:

“Furthermore, over time, the scores of documents with relatively large content updates may differ from those of documents with relatively small content updates over time.”

Botify conducted a study comparing content changes to crawl frequency.They found Larger content changes increase crawl frequency And the average keyword position of a piece of content.

In essence, the content with the most page changes has a higher crawl frequency and more keyword rankings.

Freshness content as a ranking signal: our rating

Yes, the freshness of content is a ranking factor.

Although fresh content can help improve your rankings, it is much more in-depth than updating old content or writing news or events in a timely manner.

Keep in mind that there are many reasons why your content may be considered fresh.

But even if freshness is not a Google ranking factor, keeping your content up to date, relevant, and valuable to your audience/customers/customers is always the best practice.

Please also remember that freshness alone will not rank your content. This is just one element of the content that Google views.

Always focus on quality-because high-quality fresh content (in theory, anyway!) should always beat low-quality fresh content. As long as Google is doing its job, this is right: provide the best, up-to-date results possible.

Featured image: Paul Bobita