Does Content Freshness Affect Search Results?

One question that partners often ask is whether fresh content improves search performance. In short, the answer is yes—it certainly can. However, it doesn’t always play an important part in rankings.

Evidence Freshness Affects Search Results

Let’s start by reviewing the plethora of Google’s statements which verify freshness is a factor which impacts some of their queries.

In this first quote, Google states clearly that freshness—among other things—is considered when ranking results. However, notice their nuance that the weight of freshness is based on the nature of the query:

“The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query. For example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.”

Ranking results – How Google Search works

Consistent with the first quote, Google also revealed they have dedicated systems to detect whether queries deserve freshness. Once again the examples are centred around topics with changing meaning and significance such as a recently released movie or a news story:

“We have various “query deserves freshness” systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected.”

A Guide to Google Search Ranking Systems

In the “Needs Met” portion of their Search Quality guidelines they talk about this issue more extensively and list several examples for queries which require freshness. 

It could be 

• A breaking news story (“tornado”, “tsunami”)
• A recurring event (“olympics”, “american idol”, “redsox schedule”, “tax forms”, “elections”)
• A current information query (“population of paris”, “amount of u.s. debt”, “airfare from ny to sfo”, “next federal holiday”)
• Product queries (“iphone”, “toyota camry”, “windows operating system”).

This list is presumed not to be exhaustive and it is crucially focused on meeting the needs of users. But it’s clear from this documentation that freshness is not indicative of page quality and sometimes it’s not what users are looking for:

“Freshness is generally less of a concern for Page Quality rating. “Stale” pages can have high Page Quality ratings. For example, some highly reputable news websites maintain “archival” content. However, unmaintained/abandoned “old” websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”

Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Lastly, in a recent podcast episode titled Content Decay, John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman discuss how the world moves forwards and content can be left behind. Crucially, they point content creators to consider how updating or removing old content may impact users.

“content decay in the SEO world seems to be about content that is declining in search interest.”

Let’s talk Content Decay – Search Off the Record 

It’s clear Google looks out for users who require fresh content and then tries to match them with content which is up-to-date and relevant for their needs.

How Often Should You Update Content?

The question of whether Google rewards fresh content is often bundled with the need to set content strategies. Partners, account managers, and clients all want to know how often they should update content.

There is no set time period for content to ‘decay’ and become irrelevant. For example, queries for iPhones might need updating once per year to reflect anticipation for upcoming models, recent announcements and releases, and then any reviews and criticism after the release. Rather than a single page which constantly updates, it might make sense to simply create new articles for each stage of the hype cycle.

Other queries such as the “population of London” may need to be updated after each census (every ten years) or whenever a notable study comes out which discusses the increase since the last census. Similarly, some things almost never need change. 

If you’re looking to refresh content, do it because the content has become outdated.

How Does Freshness Affect Crawling?

Google routinely checks pages which it discovered in the past. If Googlebot returns to a page and it changes infrequently then it will crawl infrequently. This helps both you and Google to effectively manage resources.

Some SEOs use tricks to maintain frequent crawling even if the content hasn’t changed. However, if content hasn’t changed, it’s not particularly clear why using server resources to crawl the page again would be an effective use of time.

One such trick is the use of <lastmod> as a property in a sitemap. This tells Google the date when content was last modified. However, Gary Illyes, a Google Search analyst, recently pointed out that whether they trust this date or not is binary—if you manipulate it, they’ll simply stop trusting it. Importantly, that’s not the same as not crawling the page, they just look for other ways to verify content has changed.

In many cases it’s not a significant concern and behaving normally will yield the best results. However, if there’s an archive of stale content which users are unlikely to want to read, then it may be worth removing the content in due course.