Content Freshness

Content freshness refers to how recently a certain body of content was published, modified or updated to reflect the most recent developments in the topic.

While updating content regularly is good practice, not all content needs to be regularly updated. For instance, if you run a food recipe blog or a website about historical facts, you may not need to update old posts every year.

If, however, you run a site about product reviews, you may need to revisit old content regularly to ensure that it stays up-to-date with the latest product features.

3.4.2 Does Content Freshness Matter for SEO?

While freshness is not a direct ranking factor in and of itself, for certain kinds of content, Google will prioritize the most recent content over others. Google explains in its search quality ratings guidelines that for queries that demand fresh information, it will rate pages based on how recent their content is.

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Google made content freshness a priority for certain kinds of content as early as 2011, when it unveiled its freshness algorithm update. The search giant said: “Search results … are best when they’re fresh.”

If Google senses a sudden increase in search queries about “hurricane in Florida”, it may deem this to be an important topic about an event unfolding in real time. As such, it would be important for people to have the latest updates about this event so they can stay safe. Google is likely to prioritize recent or recently updated content as opposed to an article published about tropical hurricanes in Florida that was last updated five years ago.

If the same Google Search users were to search about the history of tropical hurricanes in Florida in the 19th century, they may not necessarily benefit much from the “freshness” of the content.

Therefore, it is the search and its contemporary relevance which affects the requirement for content freshness.

Beyond this, regularly updating content also has certain indirect benefits such as:

• Updating content more frequently means it is likely to be crawled more frequently.

• Updating content more frequently also means you have greater opportunities to cover more of the topic and include more long-tail keywords.

• Since users are most often looking for the most recent news on any topic, content that is frequently updated helps establish a greater degree of trust.

3.4.3 What Kind of Content Is Freshness Important for?

Google doesn’t share all of the details about its algorithms but thanks to publicly filed patents and researchers, we have some idea of what affects content freshness and when does fresh content become relevant to the publishing industry.

Content freshness is the most important for four kinds of content:

1. Trending: This type attracts unexpected spikes in search queries for a particular keyword, and includes breaking news.

2. Pre-scheduled: Pre-scheduled events generate expected spikes in search queries. Searches will spike for stock prices towards the end of each quarter, while searches for certain sports team witness spikes immediately before and after matches.

3. Seasonal: Seasonal content sees spikes in searches with regular frequency at specific times of the year. For instance, searches for Oscars tend to go up each year in February.

4. Evolving: This is content that needs regular updating because of how the underlying niche evolves. Examples of this include searches for “best smartphones in 2022” or “top Billboard songs in June”.

3.4.4 How to Keep Content Updated

There are, in essence, five strategies for keeping content fresh. These are:

1. Update: This is done when the information presented in the content is outdated or isn’t useful anymore.

2. Expand: This is done when the information presented is incomplete, especially in light of new developments that may have occurred since the content was last published.

3. Reformat: This is done when a publisher feels that the content could be repackaged in a more reader-friendly format, such as adding infographics or videos.

4. Curate: This is done when a publisher has accumulated a lot of content on the same topic, and feels that it would be more helpful to curate and collect all such content together in one place.

5. Refocus: This is done when the publisher feels that it would be useful to present the content from another perspective.

The strategy you adopt will depend on the degree/extent of content freshness demanded by

your niche/topic. We discuss this in detail below.

Knowing When to Refresh Content

Content is refreshed or updated to achieve either or both of these two objectives:

1. The content has seen a drop in traffic or has not been performing well since its publication as measured by various metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR).

2. The content has become outdated due to new developments in the domain, and it is possible to reflect these new developments without creating new content from scratch.

To assess when content needs to be refreshed, you will need to assess the following metrics:

Search Topics That Are Gaining/Losing Relevance

Tools such as Google Trends or Ahrefs can help you identify traffic volumes, fluctuations and trends relating to keywords and topics..

For example, the arrival of the winter each year sees searches for winter wear begin to rise, hitting their peak in November and December. We can see this in the graph below from Google Trends:

This is a sign to publishers operating in this niche to refresh/update old content. Publishers could do this by adding the latest winter wear trends for the current season to their existing body of content.

This works because certain fashion trends are evergreen, while others have a shelf life of several years, whereas a handful of newer trends would likely have arrived with the onset of the new season.

For more on how to use Google Trends as a publisher, see our detailed module here.

Traffic and Engagement on Your Website

Publishers can use tools such as Google Analytics to gain insights on the number of visitors, time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc. A low engagement time and high bounce rate for a particular piece of content may indicate the need to refresh/update the content.

Performance Against Your Competitors

You can also measure your performance against your competitors. If competitor web pages with similar content gain more traction compared to yours, you might want to refresh or update your content to bring it up to par.

You can use tools such as Surfer Seo to do a simple comparison of your performance against your competitors.

3.4.5 Best Practices for Refreshing Content 

Now that we know when to refresh content, we now look at some best practices involved in refreshing content.

Check the Age of the Top SERP Results

To get an idea of the average age of content ranking on the first page of Google search for your search query or its related keywords, look for the publication date of the date each article was last modified.

Doing this for the first 10-20 results gives you an idea of how important content freshness is for that topic or keyword. If Google is only ranking recently published/updated articles, it is a signal that Google may be giving more weight to content freshness here.

Publish Content More Frequently

While frequency of publishing is not a direct ranking factor, the more you publish, the more often Google is likely to crawl your content. If you are publishing new content frequently, this lets Google know to check your website more frequently for updates.

It also lets Google know that you are a publisher that regularly updates content, and thus it is more likely to show your content in search results for queries for which freshness matters.

Update Internal Links

Along with updating and refreshing content, it is good practice to update your internal linking structure too. Deploying a good internal linking strategy that links to older content is more likely to enable Google to discover more of your content. For more on how internal links help with SEO, see our detailed module here.

Prioritize Ranking Content for Update

If you have a lot of old content on your website in need of refreshing, and aren’t sure where to begin, it is best to prioritize content that is already ranking on Google, but may have seen a drop in recent times, over content that never did well. This is because content that never ranked most likely suffers from deeper structural issues that a mere refresh/update is unlikely to fix.

Display Both Original and Updated Publication Dates

The hallmark of good content is providing as much transparency to the reader as is possible. With updated/refreshed content this means telling your readers three things:

• When the content was first published
• When the content was last updated or modified
• History of modifications or updates

While it may not be possible for all publishers to provide all this information all the time, it is good practice to strive for as much transparency as is possible.

Submit Updated Content for Crawling

Make sure to submit your content in Google Search Console (GSC) once you’ve finished updating/refreshing it. You may also want to resubmit your sitemap if you have made major changes to your site structure and/or internal links.

3.4.6 Avoid These Common Pitfalls

Along with following the previously mentioned best practices, it is also important to stay clear of these pitfalls when it comes to content freshness.

Never Change Dates Without Actually Updating Content

This might seem obvious, but several publishers simply update the publication dates of their content in the mistaken belief that doing so will make the content fresher, and by extension, rank higher on Google.

However, this will not have any impact on how Google ranks the page. In some cases, certain CMSs may automatically update the date after every change made to the content. In such a case, a publisher has no choice, and Google considers this acceptable.

Not Using <lastmod> Tag to Markup Modified Pages

The <lastmod> tag goes in the XML sitemap of a website and lets Google know when a page was last modified. If the values in the <lastmod> tag regularly and consistently correspond with the actual date of update, Google begins to rely on the values in the <lastmod> tag when it crawls and indexes the page. This in turn leads to easier crawling and indexing, and over time, helps Google trust the website.

3.4.7 Example of Content Refreshing Done Well

Case Study: Boss Hunting

Boss Hunting is an Australian men’s magazine that creates trending content for an audience in the 18-35 year old age demographic.

A great example of how Boss Hunting keeps content fresh is an article like this one:

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This is an article about Netflix’s latest content offerings for Australia in November. We can see that the piece was last updated on November 2, 2022.

When we look at the URL of the page, we see that it neither contains a date, nor is the month mentioned in the URL. This allows the page’s content to be updated on a monthly basis, constantly adding value to the page.

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This is exactly what Boss Hunting does. Each month, it updates the content with the latest Netflix offerings for that month.

Of course, the changes made to the content are significant, and not merely cosmetic. Boss Hunting provides useful information about the latest Netflix content for that specific month through well-researched updates to the article.

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Reusing a single URL for ongoing monthly updates also allows Boss Hunting to avoid future cannibalization issues that might spring up from creating a new page on a similar topic every month.

3.4.8 Actions and Takeaways

Not all kinds of content needs regular updating and refreshing. However, it is advisable to regularly monitor your content and update it to reflect any recent developments in the field. Content that is updated more frequently gets crawled by Google more frequently too. While this does not directly impact rankings, it benefits a page indirectly in other ways.

A good approach to content refreshing and updating involves strategically mapping your website to identify web pages, content sections which would need to be updated. This identification is based on an analysis of metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR), competitor analysis, trends/search volume spikes, anticipated interest, seasonality and regularly evolving topics.

It is good to begin by first updating pages which are already ranked rather, and to display as much information about the publication and modification dates as is possible.