Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept
Summary
After we started implementing the strategy of creating unique URLs every day, we saw much more consistent inclusion for this news outlet in Top Stories for their primary keywords. In general, high ranking articles in competitive product areas (electronics, bedding, appliances) would aggressively update their timestamps on a monthly (sometimes weekly) cadence. However, in recent years, this page lost a lot of organic traffic: The article still contained evergreen information, but it hadn’t been updated since 2016: It was the perfect candidate for our test. However, after making these two updates, we could clearly see an immediate improvement to the traffic of the second page: These two experiments combined with other tests we’ve performed are showing us that Google places value on the recency of content. While looking for real-time URLs across the entire web is daunting, using this structured data type can help them better narrow in on content they need to be crawling and indexing more frequently.