The last couple of months have been a wild ride for SEO. We had the last “Helpful Content” update that started in March and didn’t finish until May 19th, 2024. Then there was the “Spam” update also in March. Just to make things a little more complicated, Google rolled out AI overviews in US searches on May 14, 2024. I thought it was time to look back at some of our best practices and see what is still relevant. One of the regular checks we have been doing is a “Freshness Factor” check. Is this still good?
There are two parts to the Freshness Factor check. One is making sure existing content is up-to-date. What I noticed is that pages were dropping from Google’s index if titles or urls contained old dates. It seemed to be effecting content that was older than 2 years. This is easy to notice on large sites with a big archive of content. Look at the Google Search Console “Crawled Not Indexed” report. If all the pages listed have a date in the url, its easy to see the problem.
The second part is about adding new content to your website. How often are you updating the website? Are you adding entire new pages or do you have places on certain pages you update regularly? This is a reference to content frequency. But this also plays into freshness. If nothing new is happening on the website, does that not give the user an impression of a stale or inactive site?
Do we still have a Freshness Factor? Yes, because we have E.E.A.T.
Freshness Factor has been around for awhile. I am seeing Freshness as a factor when we are trying to get pages indexed right now. Since the March Core Update and the emphasis on Quality Content, your text needs to be current.
Its not as simple as changing all your dates to 2024. E.E.A.T plays a roll in this. E.E.A.T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. This is the framework Google uses to identify quality content. Quality content is also Fresh and here is why:
- Experience – Your website should reflect how long you have been in business and that you are still going strong. Someone currently doing business in their field will have recent experiences to share. They will have fresh case studies. Their content will be based on the latest technologies. They will have fresh incites on troubleshooting and best practices.
- Expertise – An experienced person will know the current information for their field. And they will also know when new information is not the best information. For example – I was helping a client do some SEO updates on past blog posts. One of the posts referenced a study done in 2010. This study is the best scientific data they had on the subject. Newer studies were not as reliable. An expert would know this. Google is also smart enough to know this is correct.
- Authority – Authority refers to whether or not your site is a trusted source on your topic. Do you have credibility in your field? Would it not make sense that in order to maintain credibility you need to be up-to-date? Wouldn’t old content make visitors question your Authority?
- Trust – Trust is a measure of accuracy. Is the content in your website true? Can it be proven or confirmed by other sources? One of the things you will want to keep fresh is links to other sites that backup what you are saying. If your sources are not fresh or worst case, broken links, that would not reflect well on your accuracy.
Page Experience and User Experience have received a lot of emphasis from Google. You could not deny this once they released the Core Vitals measurements. Google has increased the emphasis on user experience since the March updates. Having old content that references out-of-date information does not scream good user experience. Remember, updates give users a reason to return to your website and buy again.
Why businesses need fresh website content
A key role your business website can take is getting breaking news to customers. We are getting daily requests for help with posting emergency alerts. Typically this kind of content gets posted in a hurry, not a lot of thought to look and usability. I wanted to look at best practices for getting visitors to pay attention to this content. And find out what is the SEO impact of these updates. We discovered a lot of good information and collected it in our blog post.
One reason your website emergency alerts aren’t working is the Freshness Factor. This past month may have been the first time you thought to add content to your website in awhile. Problem is, your customers haven’t checked out your website content in awhile either. If you want customers and employees to pay attention to your website you have to train them. Teach them that your website contains new information. You need to show them visually that frequent updates occur.
Its not just emergencies that are crucial to your business. One of our former clients started dialing down their SEO efforts and website maintenance. For about a year they checked out from doing anything on their website. Then decided to add a new product line to their website. Google had already de-indexed many of their current pages. It took months, not weeks for Google to index their new product pages. One year later, they are still waiting to sell their first product on the site. If you get out of the habit of putting fresh content on your site, Google gets out of the habit of visiting your site.
Create a Habit of Fresh Content
Here is my homework for everyone: Create a spot on your homepage for changing information. Take some time right now to create a schedule on what to post once per month for the rest of the year. You can always change it later if something urgent pops up. Get into the habit of once per month updates. Then lets work up to weekly updates.
New content signals to customers and web visitors that your website is current. It says “Come back and check our website because new stuff is happening”. It signals to Google too. If you have new stuff for Google to look it, Google will visit more often. That also means you have more opportunities to change your rankings for the better.
Website maintenance and a Content Review are both good places to get your site back on track. Need help? Use our Free Consultation to help get the push you need in the right direction.
