How Can Content Freshness Impact SEO?
What is content freshness? Does it mean new content you published today, or does it mean content that is regularly updated? Fresh content is dynamic content. It's not about when it was published, but new content based on the data behind it. Yes, it is very confusing, but most people believe fresh content is content that has just been published, confusing freshness with frequency.
A good example would be publishing something on your blog or website that is common, something hundreds of other businesses have written about. This is not fresh, it's been done over and over again. Even though you just wrote and published it, it is not new content, it can be found anywhere n the internet.
While the post is new on your website, SEO sees it as new content without back links, but you will have a harder time ranking, due to the competitive nature of the topic. In order for your common content to become fresh, you will need a proven link building campaign in place, to boost you authority and help search engines see you as a credible source of information.
It's not uncommon for people to confuse freshness with frequency. You can post fresh content weekly or daily. The frequency is what ensures your site is crawled more often by the search engine crawlers. As a result, search engines tend to use more resources crawling and indexing sites that publish content regularly.
If you only post a blog every two weeks or once a month, chances are the search engines are not going to crawl your website as often, as it is a waste of their resources. A website publishing ten or more pieces daily will be crawled daily, as search engines ensure they check the site to index new pages published, displaying them to users based on their search query.
Google's Freshness update was first introduced back in 2009, known as Caffeine. Caffeine was a big deal, referring to fresher results. It took a full year for the update to be rolled out, but many businesses got it wrong.
Google Caffeine update was not about rankings, but focused on indexing. Google uses crawlers, also known as bots. These bots search for websites on the internet and then crawl all the pages, indexing them in a database, giving them the potential to be ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs).
When a user carries out a search, Google goes into the index and looks for relevant results.
There are some topics where Google requires freshness. The update impacted:
The freshness updates mostly impact news websites. This can include general news, technology, politics, celebrities, and more.
QDF is Queries that Deserve Freshness. This is when users want the latest posts, giving you the upper hand and enhancing your SEO efforts. This means some articles with outrank others due to the date they were posted, but there are still a number of factors that will influence your ranking.
It's not just the date, it is the topic you choose. Are the articles getting back links?
Content freshness is not only about publishing on a regular basis, it's about providing new content that offers value to your users. Content freshness is finding that unique angle to write about, that sets your published posts apart from your competitors. It does not mean publishing on a regular basis, but more about adding value to your users, providing them with a great user experience (UX).
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