There are a lot of factors that determine the positioning of our site in search engines. In fact, there are about 200 of them, so it is difficult to focus on all of them at the same time.

That is why it is crucial to be aware of what is new in the digital world. We must know not only what the trends are, but also which of them are working best, so that we can adapt our strategies. And if we talk about trends, nowadays something we should definitely pay attention to is the content’s freshness.

What is “Fresh content”?

Technically, any change or new entry on a site will be considered “fresh content”. What does this mean? It means that search engines will crawl our site looking for new content and, when they find it, they will evaluate if it is relevant enough.

So far everything seems simple, but -of course- it is not so simple. Because good positioning is not only achieved through fresh content. If we think of sites with catalogs or information that does not vary, Google can still reserve the top positions if your keywords are relevant to users.

So… is everything fresh content? Of course it isn’t. Google considers fresh content to be essentially the following:

• Recent events or hot news: when users search for trending content or news.
• Recurring events: when users search for sports events or weather information.
• Frequent updates: when users are looking for information that changes often, but is not really hot news or a recurring event, such as product or service research.

Fresh content and SEO

Months ago, an experiment was conducted to see how relevant fresh content was for SEO. For that, the site of a major U.S. online furniture retailer was used.

The idea was to test whether adding the word “updated” and the current year (i.e. 2022) to the title page would generate an increase in organic traffic and, therefore, that Google would consider it a sign of “fresh content”.

After 21 days, the results obtained showed just a 4.9% increase in organic clicks on the pages tested.

What does this prove? That we cannot fool Google with an action as simple as modifying the date and adding the word “updated”. As we can see from the results, those two actions could be considered a good CTA (call to action) – since there was a slight increase in clicks – but they were not enough for Google to consider the site’s content fresh.

Google and fresh content

You may be wondering “how does Google measure the freshness of my content?”. That’s why we at BROOBE want to show you 5 ways Google measures the freshness of your site:

1. Publication date: as we have already seen, the publication date is very important for Google to consider our content fresh.
2. Number of modifications: the more updated we keep our content, the better our positioning will be. Google loves that we renew the information on our site because, ultimately, users are looking for current content.
3. Frequency of modifications: it is not only important to update, but also how often we do it. A site with constant modifications is an active site.
4. Rate of new links: a website with an increase in its rate of new links could indicate a sign of relevance for search engines. In other words, the site would be more relevant and, consequently, fresher.
5. Fresh sites pass on their freshness to us: as with the authority of a site, a backlink coming from a site considered “fresh” by Google will immediately give us freshness as well.

We have solutions

If you feel your site needs to be “fresher”, contact us. At BROOBE we have a team of professionals that will help your site get better performance and better SEO positioning.