Does g00gle even care about fresh content?

For example a lot of sites ranking in my niche don't even add blogs regularly so I'm curious if fresh content is much of a ranking factor with g00gle. I feel like it used to be more but not sure nowdays, asides for with news sites of course.


What do you all think?


Cheers

Yes, there is a freshness factor and sites with regularly updated content tend to do better, however it still depends more on the link profile.

I don't quite agree with you. Most sites ranking in the first pages today regularly update their content. I'm not sure about your niche, so cannot comment.

jekyll said:

Think about it - being posted today, content gets a bit more clicks than content that got posted, lets say, a week, month, year, ago. And since CTR is a factor...

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Fresh content does NOT get more clicks than old content lol.. From a user's point of view, when was the last time you checked the article's date on an evergreen niche keyword? CTR on the SERP-s depends solely on the title and description (and sometimes on other things such as stars in e-commerce niches, snippets, etc..).

Not if it's junk content. No one wants junk content in their serps regardless of how much you post.

Google are the devil.

Fresh and refresh, absolutly.

NO, fresh content is NOT a ranking factor for your main keywords, instead of asking here where you have a huge change that your question is going to be answered by folks who have no clue what there are talking about, i suggest you do a study of the SERPS, especially local SERPS were you will see the same sites ranking year in and year out without being updated EVER!!!!!

But then again you can also go with the answers of WF/MOZ/SEL parrots that have a fundamental belief that Google really gives a shit about fresh/high quality content, just because they said so in the Google hangout were the "cool kids" hang.....

Updating the current article ? I don't think so

Adding more words to your website ? YES , that helps a lot ,

Fresh content helps to get indexed and ranking factors.

Fresh content helps, because lot of people are using time filters that Google has introduced in search tools, especially in the technology segment.

Fresh content matters alot in SEO!

HoneyHelper said:

Fresh content matters alot in SEO!

Click to expand...

No it does NOT! It was, it is and it will always be about LINKS - no fresh crap, no "content is king" BS, no user engagement or all the other crap that is being fed by Google propaganda every day.

Depends on your niche, but fresh updates may also tell actual human site visitors that you are active and knowledgeable in your field. That's not an SEO value, but it's still a benefit of posting regularly.

What the white hat people are saying to you use, " get links". You see they are just fluffing it up in jargon and misinformation so they in return can get links. The reason they want links is because the number one ranking factor in all search engines is........ Yes you guessed it links. Lets take a look at my paint skills er I mean diagram.



What you see above is a straight up paint master piece. But it pretty much sums up everything white hat. At first glance you might think your prodigy 6 year old might have drawn it but I assure you its all me.

Lets dive in an put some shit to bed.

Fresh Content

The idea of fresh content is a small ranking factor but the reason you want to do it is for links. You see the more more posts you make the more chances one of your epic, mind blowing master piece might be read by a linker(ie reader). Then the linker does what any good linker does and posts something on there mommy blog about your post and then you receive the all might link.

So from the diagram we can see the site on the left only has a few posts so naturally they receive less traffic from natural linkers and they receive less natural links. Site B has alot to say and they posts lots of useful content about random crap and more linkers have a chance to grace there blog because they have more posts. So naturally they get more organic links.

Social Signals

Social signals are guess what? LINKS!!!! So when your epic master piece gets passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert you gain more links. So as you can see the site on the left only has a few posts so unless there posts are incredibly link baity they well attract less linkers to there sight and in return get less links. Site on the right has more posts so they have more linkers visiting there pearl of wisdom and get more natural links.

Black Hat

Black hats say f the graph Ill blast my oh shit to kingdom come and back again. So they cut out all that wasted time on posting fluff articles to the linkers because they dont need them. Sure ,they like them but why waste time writing fluff pieces??? Cut out the middle man and blast away is there moto...

Content is King??? WTF LOL

Content is only good for two things: links and sales. So if your wanting natural links you better write your ass off, if you want linkers to do there job. So i guess that really makes links king huh??

TO sum it up
Im not proof reading this, your lucky I made a diagram. Also, links are king. Everything you do is to get a link in some form or fashion.

No, it is not necessary. Accounting for link loss is much more important.

If you want an example of fresh content not being necessary, just take a look at all the 4-5 page local sites that haven't been updated in years but still ranking at the top for local keywords.

Well this thing could get pretty hot and heavy relatively quickly. It seems it really is relative to where you host your party though. A lot of test scenarios are thrown around, and assumptions/conclusions get made. It's tough to think in terms of a vacuum, but the issue at some predicates is a question about local SEO and freshness factor.

I suppose just about any true SEO can relatively easily come into a local niche and get a big chunk of SERP for that. The fact that there are other more effective strategies for that particular niche does not eliminate the value of freshness in non-local seo. It also does not eliminate the possibility that recent Big G changes increased the effectiveness of other SEO strategies including posting more fresh content.

Of course it is hard to argue with the logic of volume of high quality posts leaves a great opportunity for people to willingly link back to a website. Maybe everyone has a little bit of truth in it all, and the best strategy to rank is actually a little bit different for any given niche although there may often be common effective strategies such as natural link-building.

Casting my .02 overall with those saying freshness factor is relevant.

Entirely depends on the niche.
If you are in a newsy marketplace where the products change and fresh ideas are pumped out daily - then yeah. G will expect and reward freshness.
If you are selling Victorian brass door knockers and the same products and customers have been around for 120 years then not so much.

No right or wrong answer. Do what is right for your niche in terms of content updates.


Scritty

old content will still rank if it ends a search, ending search seems bigger & bigger in my optimizations. meaning, someone clicks on your link, even if they bounce fast, if they don't click on another link in SERP or do another google search for related term, then that content can live even if not updated, not to say though that updating doesn't help.