With Google’s recent updates to its freshness algorithms, maintaining fresh content has become more important than ever, particularly for larger websites with multiple pages. But how do online marketers successfully build quality, scalable content and keep it up to date?
Rand Fishkin is CEO & Co-founder of the SEO software company SEOMoz.
- What’s behind the latest Google freshness update
- How to build freshness into content for a large website
- How content, ranking, and SEO are intertwined
SEO expert Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz reviews some of the recent changes in Google’s algorithms for freshness.
‹Search engines likes fresh content› means that new content will rank higher for a given time. Sports results, movie reviews, etc. are very date sensitive.
A spike in a given search and its trend over time gives Google hints about the freshness of content. A lot of new content around a certain topic, especially from trusted sources such as Google News, is also a good signal for fresh content.
But how do search engines distinguish fresh content from older content?
Obviously publishing new genuine, never before seen content counts as fresh content. It may get tweeted, liked and +1 feedback that adds to the trigger.
Changing the publication date of a page won’t do the trick. Nor will an updated Twitter stream in the sidebar count as fresh page. SEO is a bit more complex than that…
But adding an ‹update› with additional information may be helpful. It will take a certain amount of new content for Google to interpret an ‹old› page as fresh, though. Cosmetic changes don’t count.
SeoMOZ published a post about the freshness factor on their blog.
Most websites have a few stellar articles that are found consistently in search engines and attract a lot of organic traffic. Eventually even those posts may be pushed out of the SERPs by fresher content. Therefore updating those strategicly important pages is a good idea.
Consistent publishing of fresh content will help with new traffic, earn you reputation and links and eventually lead to being a trusted source.
Social signals are key both in Google (Google Plus) and Bing (Cooperation with Facebook). Together with Twitter these three social networks are key to successful publishing.
- Trend Monitoring
- Keyword Targeting
- Consistent Content Production
- Strategic Content Refreshes
- Social Media Sharing
https://twitter.com/#!/WalterSchaerer/status/159710125056200704