If you do an internet search for the “freshness factor” or “seo freshness factor”, you’ll find thousands of pages ranging from nitty gritty details in Google’s freshrank patent application to SEO consultants promising to help you game the system one way or another.
If the former is what you’re looking for, here’s a fantastic (and slightly lengthy) resource from SEOmoz – Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings. If you’re looking for the latter, I can’t help you.
However, if you’re just trying to catch your breath and stay on top of some SEO best practices, here are our tips to make the most of Google’s Freshness Factor, based on our own experience and research.
1. Publish new pages regularly. Whether these are blog entries, full length articles, case studies, how-to guides, infographics or something else, you get credit for having a certain amount of relevant and high quality posts that is brand new.
2. Update older pages. Older pages that get updated are not considered to be quite as fresh as brand new pages, but they also take considerably less work. Just remember, Google looks at more than just the date when the page was last modified; it knows exactly what was changed, so make sure you actually re-write significant parts of these pages.
3. Update older pages often. The benefits of making frequent updates to pages go beyond the immediate boost for updating them recently just once. For example, take two pages that were both created three years ago and updated yesterday. The one that was updated every month in between will be placed higher than the one that wasn’t updated in between at all.
4. Archive super-old or irrelevant content. If your site has changed focus over the years, archive or unpublish content that is no longer relevant to your main content. This older, unrelated content can cause the rest of your site to be penalized. Additionally, archiving old pages can help reduce your number of total pages (the denominator in the ratio of fresh to total content on your site). If it’s still really useful, re-write it and publish it anew.
5. Update the Most Important Content First. If you only have time to re-write a portion of an old page, be sure you focus on the most important parts, such as the content above the fold and other non-ad text.
Have you benefitted from the freshness factor on your site? How have you adapted to this important component of SEO? ajmalseotips.blogspot.com
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