Worrying About the “Freshness” of Your Website

This article was originally published on the TrainSEM blog on 27/11/2012

The video that was here is no longer available.

Here Matt Cutts talks about whether the signal of “freshness” is important to all sites or not. The answer is no. It is not important to all sites, for news type sites it is, and even blogs, the type of sites that get updated regularly. But sites that do not require new content regularly should worry about the other 200 algorithm factors instead. There is no point changing up your existing evergreen content every now and then to try and make it appear fresh, that isn’t how it works so don’t worry about it.

For example, information on the “about us” page of your site or your article about the history of your company are not things that will need to be updated very often. Updating them for the sake of updating is not useful. If you have a shopping page, changing the item descriptions or prices will not count as freshness. However, on a side note, if you do have an eCommerce site, make sure your product descriptions are not copied/pasted from another site.