We fielded an interesting SEO question recently. “Is it really important to create more and more content to rank high?” – asked one of the WebCEO users on our Facebook page. By the way, we love to talk and are happy to discuss everything web-related (or not ;).

jim-carrey-fresh-content

Why do search engines like fresh content?

The quickest answer is “yes.”

Almost two years ago Google rolled out the Freshness Update that prioritized recent and timely results to improve search experiences. Since then it has been vitally important to update your website to meet search engine quality standards.

There are two ways to show search engines that you care about your content freshness and keep it up-to-date:

  1. You add new relevant pages. The easiest way to implement this approach is to start a blog on your domain. A blog kills two birds with one stone: it widens the semantic core of your website (which is great after the Google Hummingbird update) and gets you more visibility with the help of freshly added content (that is always great). Dive deeper into crafting compelling content with WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant, designed to elevate your content strategy.
  2. You update your most important pages. Here the amount of the updated text comes into play. For example, the change of a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

These two approaches work the best when used together.

Note: Search engines are clever enough to understand that the newest result isn’t always the best. Consider a search for “Hamlet” for example. An older, authoritative result may be the best here. In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.

Feel free to leave your questions to be answered on our SEO-in-Brief Fridays on our Facebook page, on Twitter or just leave a comment here.

Have a nice weekend and think of some great content ideas so you can make them go live on Monday!