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 The old post is likely to be out of date and may not offer you the right information you are looking for so Google are unlikely to return this result to the top.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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