While Google and other search engines have their own confidential search algorithms to rank websites there are few trends which become apparent through experience. The freshness of your content has a big upward influence on search engine ranking and the more fresh your content is the more you get noticed by the search engines.
Importance of Fresh Content
If you think about this from the perspective of a search engine, you will find that any search engine would want the most relevant and interesting content to be on the top of their search results page. This helps customers find what they are looking for and more advertisers will invest in advertisements on the search engine.
Also it is logical to rank webpages based on freshness. Say for example you are searching for “top 10 Fortune 500 companies”. Ideally you are looking for the latest list of top companies. Now it is logical to display you the most recent list published. It would be annoying if you see results for 2008, 2009 or 2010. These pages are likely to be outdated and wont offer you much recent information.
Impact of fresh content on your blog/website
Well, here’s an example from my own blog IncrediBlogger which had a pretty good Alexa ranking and the traffic was fair. We were busy in some other projects and hardly got time to post any new article in the last few months. This has caused havoc. Now we hardly get quality visitors and the Alexa ranking has automatically fallen. So, obviously freshness of your site content has a direct impact on your organic traffic.
From this experience what we learnt is that if you want to consistently rank at the top of search engines, then you have to keep producing fresh and quality content and most importantly relevant to your blog/website niche. If you do a case study about two websites in the similar niche and same quality and useful information; one publishing content every day and the other publishing once a week, then you will find that even though they have fairly similar publishing frequency, the site which publishes content every day will get more visitors than the other; all other factors remaining the same. Of course the site which publishes content daily will have more content.
Side notes – Fresh Content
- Higher Rankings because Google loves fresh content.
- More content for your readers to keep them interested.
- Keeps your website up to date with the latest information.
- Brings in more traffic and lowers Alexa ranking.
Point to be noted
In the hurry to post fresh content do not compromise with your quality. Most webmasters write junk for the sake of publishing an article a day. Hence fresh content should not only be fresh, but should be of great quality and should add value to your readers. Settling for large quantity of fresh content compromising quality will be again a drawback.
Hope this article helps you and you might get the motivation to post fresh content and be in the race of SERP. I have decided to post articles regularly and come back in the game.
Good one.. !!!
Thanks Raveesh.