Many webmasters are drawn to the possibility of passive income by simply ranking high on Google search. While there are websites that still rank with minimal (or even zero) updates from its owners, know that these cases are very rare. There are a lot of factors involved when it comes to Google’s various algorithms, after all. The keywords that you are targeting or are ranking for, as well as their corresponding competitors, would have to be considered as well. It has even been revealed that different search queries have equally dissimilar requirements for freshness.
Google has Confirmed that It Prioritizes Fresh Content
If there is one fact that should convince almost any webmaster to make sure that his content is up-to-date it is that Google themselves have said that they really place greater importance on new content. After all, Google gives a freshness score for every web page that it indexes. This score gradually decreases over time, from the time the page was first discovered by Google and placed on its index. The fact that Google has such a system in place is pretty telling of how important freshness is to a site’s overall SEO.
How Much Change is Actually Needed to Score High Freshness Scores?
It has to be stressed, though, that simply changing a few words on various sentences on your body text would prove to be futile as these kinds of practices rarely impacts the freshness of its content. If Google discovers that you did a lot of changes on larger bodies of texts in your content, though, this would surely cast a favorable light on its freshness. These are core parts of your content that, once updated, would immediately catch Google’s attention.
How Frequently Should You Change Your Content?
It’s not clear as to how Google sees the rate of change in a web page, but what’s certain is that a page that is being updated daily is scored differently from one that only introduces changes to its content once a year.
Do External Link Signals Matter?
There is strong evidence that supports new link signals as playing an important role in freshness as well. This has lead SEO experts to conclude that a web page’s freshness is not solely limited to its main body of text. This is because any change (increase, in particular) in the growth of external links to a site is viewed by search engines as a sign of not only relevance but freshness as well. It has to be noted, though, that the freshness score is still primarily based on what specific topic or news (e.g. celebrities that are getting married this week, recent discovery of a cure to cancer, etc.) these links are pointing to.
It’s Not Rocket Science
Google’s Freshness Algorithm should never make any webmaster feel daunted, at the least bit. In the end, what you really should consider when trying to keep your content as up-to-date as possible is that what counts as fresh content is almost always something that is relevant to your target niche, shareable, and was posted to impart new information. It just takes a bit of know-how, instinct, and anticipation to pinpoint just what it is exactly that people (and Google) would consider as newsworthy. Otherwise, you can always opt to keep yourself informed of current events or developments in your niche through various platforms online.
Author Bio:
Martin Brown is the Marketing Executive of Top SEO Rankers based in New York. Top SEO Rankers evaluates and lists the top Digital Marketing firms and also gives SEO service providers a direct channel for prospective
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