Fresh Content | Understand The Importance Of Regularly Publishing New Content

In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, fresh content is vital for maintaining visibility and relevance in search engines. Whether you're an SEO expert or a business owner, regularly updating your website’s content can significantly improve your search rankings and overall online presence. But what exactly is fresh content, and why does it matter to both users and search engines like Google? Learn more about it in the article below. Let’s dive in!

What Is Fresh Content

Fresh content refers to newly created or recently updated material on your website. It can range from new blog posts, articles, and product pages to updates on existing pages such as adding new data, images, or internal links.

Fresh content doesn't necessarily mean entirely new pages or articles. It can be as simple as updating and republishing old content with relevant information. Or even more simply - if an older article is still up to date, but new information has come to light on the subject, you could easily add 1, 2, or 5+ sections to the article and it would qualify as fresh content. Google’s algorithms prioritize sites that regularly update their content to ensure they remain relevant and accurate. It’s a sign that you - as the website owner - care about your content and your audience.

Why Is Fresh Content Important?

Fresh content is important for a few key reasons:

• Search Engine Rankings: Google favors websites that frequently publish and update content, especially if it meets the needs of users and aligns with current search trends. Regular updates signal that your website is active, reliable, and engaged with current information.
• User Engagement: Updated content helps keep your audience engaged and returning for more. Visitors are more likely to interact with your site if they know they’ll find relevant and up-to-date information. In fact that is how an audience is built. They enjoy your content and come to expect new, regular content.
• Competitive Advantage: Routinely updating your content can give you a competitive edge over businesses whose websites are stagnant. By providing the latest insights, you position yourself as an industry leader and a reliable source of information. In turn, your business pages will begin to rank above your competitors.
• Crawl Budget: Having fresh content increases your crawl budget because crawlers will find regular fresh content when they crawl your website. In turn, they’ll crawl your site more often, and if you continue growing your content, and ensure everything is dialed in as far as SEO, your crawl budget will increase naturally.

How Google Views Fresh Content

Google’s algorithm takes several factors into account when evaluating content freshness. These include:

• Update Frequency: How often do you update or add new content to your site? Websites that consistently provide new material tend to rank higher. Just because you update your content does not mean you will rank higher though. This tends to be true only if the content you are making is relevant, high-quality, and optimized for both users and search alike.
• Types of Changes: Fixing typos and rewording some headings doesn’t make an article fresh. When asking yourself if you are doing enough when updating content to consider it “fresh”, think changes like: adding 3+ sections (each with headings and at least two paragraphs), restructuring existing content, adding new assets (images, videos, etc.). Changes like these will ensure your content is seen as fresh because they provide quality and relevant information for your users.
• Historical Data: Another important aspect of fresh content is the publication date and the update dates. You can take control of this by implementing schema into your content.

What Is Your Freshness Score & How Can You Improve It

Your freshness score is a ranking signal that evaluates how up-to-date your content is compared to competitors. Google hasn’t provided an exact metric for this yet, but we'll share some important aspects of what their patents talk about related to your freshness score. Before diving in however, make sure any content you create complies with SEO best practices! Now here's how your freshness score can be improved:

• Update Older Content Regularly: Refresh older posts with new data, internal links, and updated keywords. Add new images or assets to older content if it would provide additional context or value to users.
• Republish With a New Date: When major updates are made, republish the content to show search engines that it's relevant again. Also make sure to update the schema to reflect the updated content’s date (if you are using schema - which you should be if you read our articles)
• Add New Sections: Expand your articles with current statistics, case studies, or trends to keep them engaging and relevant. If new information comes out on the topic you’re covering, make sure to update any and all relevant articles to ensure your users are seeing the most up-to-date information.

How Often Should You Update Your Content

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to updating your content. However, the following guidelines may help:

• Monthly Updates: Update a set amount of articles each month. Have it in your calendar to comb through at least 10 articles a month for example, and make sure you document each of these updates so you can ensure all of your content is updated at least a few times a year. For your most important content, you’ll want to consider updating it even more often. Monthly updates might not even be enough for highly competitive content.
• Industry-Specific Updates: In certain industries like SEO, tech, fashion, etc., you’ll see many examples of constantly updated content. In industries like these - as new information surfaces - it’s important to update any content relevant to these changes. Certain industries have changes like these quarterly, yearly, monthly, etc. Knowing your industry, watch out for opportunities to improve your content utilizing the information covered in these updates. Both your audience and search engines will reward you for your time with these updates.

Google's Patents & Systems Considering Content Freshness

Google has various SEO patents revolving around their ability to measure and consider content “freshness”. Below, we’ll go through a few of the most well-known ones discussing content freshness. We have many articles dedicated to the more technical side of SEO. Soon we'll have pages covering and breaking down various Google SEO patents to help our users better understand how search engines like Google actually work.

Caffeine

Launched in 2010, Caffeine is Google’s indexing system that enables faster and more efficient web crawling. It helps Google find and index fresh content much quicker than before, ensuring the search results are as up-to-date as possible. While there have been many updates since this update, the ability for Google’s search index to find, index, and rank newer content has only gotten better. Google’s users expect to see the latest most updated content possible, and so by ensuring your content matches that description is a guarantee you will put yourself in a great position to be rewarded.

QDF

The Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) model helps determine when a specific search query needs fresh content based on recent events or trends. If a query requires the most updated information possible such as news, weather, sporting events, etc., Google will prioritize results with that information. For example, if a celebrity death occurs, Google will prioritize articles written in the last 24 hours over older content. If a sporting event has an important change in scheduling, results with information related to the scheduling change will show over results still showing outdated information.

Systems and Methods for Determining Document Freshness (US7797316B2)

Google’s patent on document freshness takes into consideration the age of any pages linking internally to the page being evaluated for freshness. Meaning, if you want to rank for page A, and have page B, C, and D linking to it, if pages B, C, and D are updated and newer, page A will have a higher freshness score. But, if pages B, C, and D haven’t been updated in years, the perceived freshness of page A will be lowered.

This patent details how important it is to regularly update all content, especially the pages that are linking to your most important content. 

Freshness-Based Ranking (US8832088B1)

Freshness-based ranking is a patent that detects when certain queries are “fresh seeking” and delivers the freshest high-quality content available. While this type of freshness-based ranking isn’t typical of the majority of content on the web, it is a good example that search engines like Google do tend to prioritize content that is updated.

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Dynamic Freshness for Relevance Rankings (US11442945B1)

In dynamic freshness for relevance rankings it discusses prioritizing more trusted websites and content, but that it also peppers in lesser resources when their content is considered fresh and relevant. Meaning, even if you aren’t an incredibly authoritative source in your industry, if your content is high-quality, relevant to the query, and fresh it will rank. But, this requires you to ensure you are constantly providing new content, and that even your older content is being updated often as well.

Benefits of Fresh Content

Keeping your content fresh offers many benefits beyond SEO rankings, including:

Your Audience Stays Updated

When you keep your content updated, your audience will always have new information to glean when they visit your website. Your metrics for user engagement will increase, and you can even start to build a newsletter or a fanbase if your content is engaging and systematized well enough.

Improved Crawl Budget

Always having new pages or sections on older pages for crawlers to discover and index will prove to search engines that you deserve to be crawled more often. By showing search engines they can always expect to find new high-quality content when they crawl your website, they will increase your crawl budget so they can ensure everything you publish is indexed - that way they ensure their index is updated.

Your Website Is Considered Higher Quality By Google

Publication frequency is a big sign to the quality of a website. Lower-quality websites publish less often and they rarely update their content - if ever. So by making sure to update content regularly, and publishing new content even more regularly (3-5 articles a week) you’ll grow your audience, and your trust in the eyes of search engines. By taking care of your website and your audience in this way, Google will view your content as higher quality.

Continued Ranking Progress

Regularly refreshed content helps maintain or improve your rankings, ensuring you don’t lose traction to competitors who update more frequently.

How Can You Maximize The Benefits of Fresh Content?

• Develop a Content Strategy: Plan your content updates and new posts well in advance to ensure you're consistently refreshing your site. Building a content strategy or “calendar” is an important part of the process. Companies utilizing content calendars miss publishing deadlines far less frequently, as you’ll have a backlog of content ready to publish at any given time.
• Monitor Performance: Track how your updates impact search rankings and engagement metrics to refine your strategy. You’ll never hurt your website updating it too frequently. In fact, there is no such thing as too frequently. But, you can hurt your rankability by failing to update often enough.

Developing & Executing Your Content Strategy

To reap the maximum benefits from fresh content, develop a comprehensive strategy that includes:

• Regular Audits: Identify content that needs refreshing based on performance metrics like traffic and engagement.
• Content Calendar: Schedule updates and new posts to ensure you’re consistently publishing fresh content.
• SEO Optimization: Continually refine your SEO practices by updating keywords, internal links, and optimizing for user experience.