Google in a bid to return the best quality/matching results for web searches tend to favor fresh content for some queries as Matt Cutts in one of his video tutorials rightly confirmed. Matt explained that Google uses content freshness in scoring and ranking a page.
Google and other search engines love fresh contents as this is part of their search engine algorithms. There have been several search engine algorithm updates in the past to produce the best result for searchers and one of these recent updates is the Google’s Freshness update which places emphasis on returning fresher contents for certain queries. The Google freshness algorithm sifts through online contents looking for fresh contents in a bid to provide searchers with latest and updated result.
Why is Fresh Content Important?
Search Engines Love Frequent Updates: No one can claim to know all the factors that leads to a high search engine ranking but over time there are trends that become apparent and through experience we tend to notice them. One of these is “content freshness”, your content which constitute the bigger upward influence on your search engine ranking could affect your ranking as newer contents seems to see the top spots more often for some queries. Over time such post may lose its top ranking in search engines.
Google wants to return more relevant and up-to-date contents for its searches and will favor a more recent post than an old one for its results on some queries. For example, if you were searching for “top 5 laptops” would you rather choose a post published in 2009 or one published few days/months ago? The old post is likely to be out of date and may not offer you the right information you are looking for so Google are unlikely to return this result to the top.
Just like my friend Ryan will always say, consistently producing high-quality fresh content with good relevance can greatly improve your site’s search engine rankings. Consider two sites Site A and Site B with same content topics and Site A publishes articles everyday while Site B publishes once a week, which do you think Google will give more favor in ranking? Of course the website with slightly fresher content will mostly likely rank higher because Google loves fresh content.
Fresh content results in regular indexing: Fresh content will bring both search engine spiders and visitors to your site more often, when the spider returns and notices there haven’t been much changes on your site, it increases the time between now and when it will return again but when it returns and notices changes it will decrease the time between its last crawl and its next crawl, and regularly updated sites will bring the spiders back more often which will definitely lead to faster indexing of your site contents.
Must Read: Four Ways to Increase Site Traffic with Freshness
More content = more keywords: Content freshness helps you build authority on your niche and Google respects authority site which will also see your site’s ranking improved. Not only will this improve your search engine raking, it will also improve people’s trust on you and this could lead to more people linking to you and as I explained above, fresh links could help your post rank higher in search engines.
How to Determine Content Freshness:
Content freshness can be determined by several methods such as;
Inception date: This is when Google first becomes aware of the post either by crawling or discovering a link to the page and this degrades as the content gets older.
Changes on a webpage: The amount of change on a web page can influence its freshness score and improve its ranking. So editing your old posts and adding a few paragraphs can impact on such post’s search engine ranking.
Rate of Page Change: This has been proven as the reason why web blogs do better in search engines than static website. The rate at which you publish fresh contents has a big influence in your search engine ranking.
Increase in Links: When Google notices an increase in backlinks to a post, it sees it as an indication of relevance and improves such posts ranking.
User Behavior: When searchers quickly leave a site for another Google considers the later more relevant and of course fresh to that query and ranks it higher.
Must Read: Improving search engine ranking with Cornerstone Content
Conclusion:
Google and other search engines definitely want to return the most relevant results to users and thus favor fresh contents for some certain keywords. Fresh contents can greatly improve your site’s search engine rankings, always try and produce fresh and relevant contents on your site, and most importantly ensure they are useful to your readers. That way Google will continue to favor your site with high search engine rankings.
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Does freshness matter when it comes to building customer traffic? Just wait until this fall when Apple unveils its newest creation. Because when the latest iPhone is released, there’ll be a line around the block with people camped out, gritting their teeth to keep their spot in line before they pass out from exhaustion.
Apple is a popular brand and do not need freshness to build customer traffic but content freshness can help them stay on top of the search engine for wider outreach.
Hi Nwosu,
That’s a comprehensive article. Well said and with a reason.
I especially liked the content freshness determination part. Keep it up.
Thanks
~ Regards – BloggerDoc
Hello Desmond,
Well this seems to be a factor which most of the bloggers forget to follow as their part of blogging criteria. Freshness is something which is going to leave a significant impact in terms of Google’s ranking.
:)
Hey Bro! I do agree freshness always plays an important role and if we update regularly our blog with new post search engine will have regular visit between enjoy reading your post
Thanks Amal for your contribution, its great to see you here…
Content freshness is definitely part of search engine algorithm and it determines how sites are ranked.
Thanks Shameem, this is exactly the reason why i always update my blog.
Nwosu, thanks for the mention buddy ;), also, the key message. Create persistently, improve your skills, you can improve your SERP. Google takes notice if you churn out good stuff because hey, our blogs are news-centers, whether we think this, or not….lol….
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Hello Nwosu,
What a nice and lovely write up, if i must say :)
A regular update is the best way to keep any blog alive and healthy. The way you know a real blogger from just bloggers, are the regular updates and their quality.
Thanks for this lovely post my friend and do have a good week ahead :)
Thanks Ryan for your contribution, you inspired this post.
Thanks Babanature for your awesome contribution, being able to come up with one interesting post after the other can really help grow your audience.
Same here because I believe that freshness can not only improve SERP, but all aspect of online marketing especially in search engine rankings and generating target traffic and leads….Great post and you don’t see or read this kind of information everyday. Thanks a lot for sharing this one! :)
Thanks Aris for your great contribution.
Nwosu always comes with some innovative post ideas and this one is no exception. I realized the importance of Freshness from this article. Do Freshness also include Post Frequency ??
Wonderful piece of information Nwosu.
You’re absolutely right. In order to see the effects of this, I recently updated one of my old post and changed the date to the “updated one”. Well, the search engine result ranking improved in couple of days.
It’s a good practice though overdoing the same could hammer penalty.
Definitely, yes it does…just like i mentioned in the article, your post frequency can determine how often the search engine spiders comes back to your site to index your contents and if you publish often be sure they will return often as well and this can bring about faster indexing of your site contents.
thanks for your wonderful contribution.
No problem….. It is an honor though because I can keep reading informative posts….
Hi Nwosu,
Thanks for defining the ways of measuring content freshness. I do agree with you, frequent updates can surely improve your ranking in SERP thereby increasing your website’s traffic.
Yeah, I know the importance of fresh and unique content.
So I used to publish the fresh post with consistency to get love from search engines :)
This is really great! A good source of information. Thank you for sharing this very informative post.
And i bet its working wonders for you?
Thanks Cassie for your wonderful comment.
great post you have created here, it just that some blogger just don’t seem to get it, fresh content matters a lot for the success of a blog
Thank you Nwosu for the insightful post. After I read Glen’s post about how Google is really working, I was troubled to accept. I wondered if simply changing the post date or update date can have such a huge impact on SERP. You have listed some of the factors that can influence the ranking. Now I feel I got a bit more insight on the topic.
Good work! Keep it rocking.
Glen was actually talking about new SEO i do not think there is anything like that, Google does have something it calls “Query Deserved Freshness (QDF)”. If there’s a search that is suddenly very popular versus its normal activity, Google will apply QDF to that term and look to see if there’s any fresh content on that topic. If there is, that new or fresh content is given a boost in search results.
content freshness attracts search engines bot to your site ,thereby ensuring regular and quick indexing of content
Content is an most important factor which plays a best role in online business promotion. After the update in google rules known as panda update, the content is become the king and base of business promotion.
After the launching of Panda update of google, the content is become the king to best position in SERP. With the help of fresh, unique and relevant content, the desired success of an online business can get easily.
Yeah ,nwosu you got it all right . Quality and fresh content matters alot and its importance can never be over emphasised. Who doesnt love new or latest thing same thing applies here ,so as a blogger to get that target of receiving better traffic and search engine indexing you must always consider this awesome factor. Thanx once again.
Yes yes, definately because as all the PRO-BLOGGERS say that CONTENT IS THE KING but it also matters that the FRESHNESS lying into it is maintained.
Content freshness can indeed improve search engine ranking as discussed in the article.