Content freshness is one of the more nuanced areas of SEO, which is why it’s often misunderstood. The fact is that if you publish more often or regularly refresh your content, you’ll master this ranking factor. Having fresh content on your website is good for SEO, but only when the content adequately answers the intent of the search query.
Not sure exactly what fresh means when it comes to content? Let’s take a deeper look at the meaning of fresh content, what Google has to say on the subject, and how you can approach freshness as an SEO best practice for your website.
Quick Takeaways:
- Fresh content is important, but updating and posting frequently for the sake of freshness isn’t likely to help your rankings.
- Freshness is more pertinent to your SEO strategy if your content is mostly news-related or if you’re in a fast-moving niche.
- You can improve your content strategy by leveraging both evergreen and fresh content – there’s value in both.
What Is Fresh Content?
New or updated content is fresh content. If you’re regularly publishing blog posts and updating old content that has gone stale, you’re improving the freshness of your site.
Freshness makes sense when you really look at the job of search engines. Their objective is to identify valuable, relevant content for searchers. Outdated and obsolete material isn’t relevant.
A website that doesn’t have enough new, fresh posts may see:
- Less engagement
- Higher bounce rates
- Lower rankings
- Search traffic plateaus
You can get a double boost from focusing on freshness.
- First, from the number of updates to your site, which attracts web crawlers
- Second, from the quality of the updates you make – for example, if you improve the content and garner backlinks from high-authority sites, this could give your content a boost
However, freshness isn’t…
