How does Google determine freshness of content?
-
With the changes in the Google algorithm emphasizing freshness of content, I was wondering how they determine freshness and what constitutes new content. For instance, if I write a major update to a story I published last July, is the amended story fresh? Is there anything I can do in addition to publishing brand new content to make Google sure they see all my new content?
-
Rand and iPullRank just did a great WBF on the topic:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday
-
Google will find new content on your site if it is new pages or revised pages.
So, do what will work best for your visitors and that usually works best for google too.
Your visitors are the ones who send signals to google by their actions on your site, by likes, tweets, links, bookmarks and more.
Build a great site and Google will usually like it.
-
I think there is one thing that overcomes freshness of content: regularly updated content. So it is not enough just to write a single page about a topoic and publish it and wait for google to index. It is considered to be fresh but it is not updated and probably will not be able to make it to the top. Look at newsportals on the other hand: they are always publishing and publishing and getting indexed several times a day.
So the consequence is that it is not enough to have fresh content once a year, but you need to have regular fresh content - the more the better. This way you are getting indexed frequently, so you don't need to worry about google finding fresh material, and your rankings will improve as well as google sees your site is up to date, it always contains the latest news (you would not like to learn form a 10 year old seo book neither).
Two things you can do besides regular writing to get indexed more often is to implement google site search as your search engine inside your site and to keep your pages as light as possible. Google always spends a planned amount os time on your site. It can make a big difference if google can index 5 or 10 pages in that given amount of time.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content or an update ???
Buying Guide and Product Category page competing for the same keyword ? Got a “nuts and bold website” selling basic stuff. Imagine selling simple nuts, bolts and washers (the little ring that goes in between) in different metals. Imagine a website with a very wide and deep line of these simple products. For long tail keywords we rank well (Example: 0.25 inch bolts). For the keyword: “Nuts bolts” our main category page use to rank well low 1<sup>st</sup> page to second page up against the big guys (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, some drug store who may have a mix pack of nuts and bolts, but still Google don’t see the difference and list 2 pages each for these guys). But then in mid-February there were an update and suddenly our “Buying guide for nuts and bolts” rank higher and started to compete with our own product category page. That was never our intention. These two pages now compete for the ranking on page 4<sup>th</sup>. Clearly there were more words on the buying guide page but no changes had been made to it for well months or years. To make up for it some more words were added to the category page, but of cause there is only so many way you can fraise words about “nuts and bolts” without sounding a bit duplicate/re-writing. So what do I do now ?? Clearly the product category page is the one we like to rank highest with the guide a close 2nd. Most customer don’t need the buying guide but it is good to have and great support as we got lot of good comments from customer who read it. Made a link to the buying guide from the category page and wise verses. The category page got an embedded video. Moz list the page authority for the category page to 16 and 1 for the buying guide but clearly G see it differently. Already tried to change the Meta Tag Title and Description a little but it is hard to do if the word “Nuts Bolts” is to appear in the description or people don’t know what to expect. Could just insert a “do not index” for the buying guide but not a good long term solution. Unfortunately I am out of imagination at this point. Any good suggestions ?? Thanks, Kim Any good suggestions ???
Technical SEO | | KimX0 -
Is this going to be seen by google as duplicate content
Hi All, Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer in regards to this. I have been conducted a bit of analysis of our server access file to see what googlebot is doing, where it is going etc. Now firstly, I am not SEO but have an interest. What I am seeing a lot of is that we have URL's that have an extension that sets the currency that is displayed on the products so that we can conduct Adwords campaigns in other countries, these show as follows: feedurl=AUD, feedurl=USD, feedurl=EUR etc. What I can see is that google bot is hitting a URL such as /some_product, then /someproduct?feedurl=USD and then /someproduct?feedurl=EUR and then /someproduct?feedurl=AUD all after each other. Now this is the same product page and just has the price shown slightly different on each. Would this count as a duplicate content issue? Should I disavow feedurl? Any assistance that you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Avoiding Cannibalism and Duplication with content
Hi, For the example I will use a computers e-commerce store... I'm working on creating guides for the store -
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
How to choose a laptop
How to choose a desktop I believe that each guide will be great on its own and that it answers a specific question (meaning that someone looking for a laptop will search specifically laptop info and the same goes for desktop). This is why I didn't creating a "How to choose a computer" guide. I also want each guide to have all information and not to start sending the user to secondary pages in order to fill in missing info. However, even though there are several details that are different between the laptops and desktops, like importance of weight, screen size etc., a lot of things the checklist (like deciding on how much memory is needed, graphic card, core etc.) are the same. Please advise on how to pursue it. Should I just write two guides and make sure that the same duplicated content ideas are simply written in a different way?0 -
Google is indexing my directories
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Will Google Continue to Index the Page with NoIndex Tag Upon Google +1 Button Impression or Click?
The FAQs for Google +1 button suggests as follows: "+1 is a public action, so you should add the button only to public, crawlable pages on your site. Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click." If my page has NoIndex tag, while at the same time inserted with Google +1 button on the page, will Google recognise the NoIndex Tag on the page (and will not index the page) despite the +1 button's impression or clicks send signals to Google spiders?
Technical SEO | | globalsources.com0 -
Content Delivery Network
Anyone have a good reference for implementing a content delivery network? Any SEO pitfalls with using a CDN (brief research seems to indicate no problems)? I seem to recall that SEOmoz was using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for CDN. Is that still the case? All CDN & AWS experiences, advice, references welcomed!
Technical SEO | | Gyi0