“Fresh content brings higher Search Engine Rankings” and “Search Engines love fresh content”. These are the SEO maxims that we can often hear from SEO world. It is obvious that fresh content attracts human visitors. But do search engines also give importance to it? The recent important changes in the search engine algorithm is to have relevant as well as fresh content to display in the search results. Google engineers are working hard to keep the search results as fresh as possible so that they reflect the most up to date content on the web. The updated content has become one of the important criteria for search engines to crawl, index and rank websites.
What do we really mean by fresh content?
Not every site is a blog that will need to be updated daily or weekly. Having a fresh content does not mean changing the content of the entire home page or important pages which already have good and relevant content in the site but it may be adding a new pages, Fresh blog posts or re-written pages so that the Web site is up to date and helps to encourage and attract visitors. We can keep our site updated by way of regularly checking whether our content up-to-date with any recent changes in the industry, updating the blog regularly and keep watching our competition and make sure that we stay with the trend. This is the simple indication we are making to Search engines that our page is still relevant.
We know that different websites have different search engine crawl rates. Websites that update their content regularly will have a frequent search engine crawl rate than the websites that hardly update. Search engines like Google look for updated content while crawling the website. If it finds a fresh content at the time of crawling, it will decrease the crawling duration and if it does not find it will increase the crawl duration for the page and it acts thus vice versa. Hence the website with daily updates may have several times crawling in a day. The increase in crawling rate leads to faster indexing of the page. And thus help your updated content reach SERP quickly.
Adding fresh content alone can not determine the better ranking of the website. Adding a fresh content is crucial but It depends on how it works with other factors like relevancy of that content to the page, key phrases and backlinks. Having a irrelevant content which does not meet the objective of the website will dilute the website and may result in lowering the search engine rankings. So it has to be used properly within the SEO strategy.
Fresh content is what Google messaging indirectly on their latest caffeine update. Here is a snippet from Google’s official blog post,
“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”
According to Vanessa Fox in a post in Search Engine Land,
“Google told me that this change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before. It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly than before…”
Even if Caffeine have no immediate effect on rankings, it makes crawled content available in search results more quickly than before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the whatever may come as the web evolves. But it will have an impact on rankings some point in the future.
Some suggestions to rank well in latest update,
- Re-examine the site for freshness or uniqueness
- Leverage your social media presence to diversify the link portfolio
- Target only high relevant backlinks
- For websites with reviews and FAQ, make sure to have fresh reviews for products and Q & A, It will have significant impact on freshness of the page and to attract Google’s attention
- Place snippets on your pages of your blog posts about products, press releases, so that every time the snippet changes, it alarms the search engines for freshness of the page.
There are numerous other ways we can deliver fresh content to a website. If you come across any valuable insight into this please share your thoughts by way of commenting in the blog post.
Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.
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