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How important is page freshness for search ranking and results
Posted by on September 23, 2022 at 5:52 pmI have some older articles that rank well. Should I update their content periodically? How important is last update date of the page for Google? Will I get penalized if content is >year old?
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1 Reply
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In my experience it is extremely important, especially for QDF terms (read up on “query deserves freshness” if you’re not familiar).
After all when we’re looking for information, we want it to be up to date — so all other things being equal, result that from last week is more appealing than a result from two years ago. Users want up-to-date information so Google tends rewards newer results. This has led to a culture of constant content updates across the industry.
In fact have also seen cases where a site ranks for a term with one page and simply updating a different page to have a newer datestamp than the ranking page results in that newer page taking the site’s spot for the term. So you’re not only competing with other sites from a freshness perspective, you’re also competing with yourself.
Good luck!
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I think that reviewing and potentially updating your content regularly is critically important for SEO, at least in certain verticals and for some types of content.
With clients who are publishers, I have a system set up to remind me to review the query data in GSC for opportunities at 6 months and 12 months after publishing an article. There is almost always some useful query data with which I can re-optimize the content, and in almost all cases when I do so the performance for the re-optimized articles improves, sometimes by a considerable amount.
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