How fresh is the content on your website? Google will sniff it out.

You may not know this but Google files Patents to protect the algorithm changes it wants to make when it comes to all the searches and making them better. Especially with its ever-increasing shift towards a more commercial model, Google wants to deliver more accurate search results.

Some changes it uses and are significant, some it doesn’t or uses as part of another change elsewhere.

However, one of the elements to the ‘search algorithm’ that’s widely accepted as being fact, rather than myth, is the freshness of a website’s content.

Whilst we won’t go into the depths of the search algorithm here, we will cover the importance of website content freshness as this is the part over which you have most control.

Let’s start with some basics

Here are three camps in terms of websites and their content:

• Those of a factual basis where the content rarely, if ever, changes (factual documents and information from history)
• Those of a topical basis that change almost every hour of every day (news, product pricing etc)
• Those that change from time to time (sites that sell stuff – whether physical products or services)

Regardless of which camp in which your website’s content sits, you want it to be delivered when it’s searched for.

So, when you think of ‘freshness’ contrast against the published date of the content, how does Google know what it should deliver and when?

For example, a website with pages that relate to historical events, such as, ‘Watford FC fixtures 2012’ the facts are irrefutable and won’t change – so you want these pages to be delivered when you search for this. However, if you limited that search phrase to ‘Watford FC fixtures’, chances are, you are looking for the date of the next game or two – so you want the pages that cover the current fixtures to be delivered.

How does Google know what the difference is and so which page to deliver?

Does it look at the meta of the publishing date? It used to. However, current thinking is that it can tell the difference between one page and another by how often the site and those pages are updated (compared to the last time it visited and cached the page).

Google knows that if a web page’s content is 6 years old and has only been updated once in that time, it’ll work out that this is more of a historical content page, whereas, if it sees a site and/or page has content that’s changing all the time (such as the news pages on the Watford FC website) it’ll work out that the content on that is more topical and deliver that in search results.

So, what does this mean to you and for your website when it comes to Google?

We know that Google likes to see a site that has a mixture of all page types. Some areas that change regular, others that change infrequently. That way, it can tell what’s hot and what’s not and so rank the content accordingly.

It supports the idea and our best practice website SEO advice that it’s important to make sure you are always adding new content to your site and that it’s also worth, every now and again, revisiting the content to update it.

As in most areas of business and the internet – things change. What was important or current thinking is no longer that and so revisiting a blog post or white paper that gives some information is worth refreshing and updating. Google will see that the page has been edited and updated and boost its prominence when searched for.

The bottom line is that if you run or are responsible for a website it’s important that the content on it is kept fresh and up to date if it’s selling something or you’re providing news or topical information of some kind and stick to a regular schedule of doing so.

In the same vain, if you have a website that the facts never or rarely change, when you do change it, Google will pay attention as it’ll see a sudden change to, what it would have earmarked as a ‘sleeping beast’ and run along to see what’s changed and re-cache the content.

It’s worth saying that if we hear it once a week, we hear it 10 times, pulling together the content for a website is hard. You know what you do or sell but you want to focus your time doing just that. However, getting someone who doesn’t work in your business to write the content for you, such as asking the web designer, is not the right approach – it’s a bit like asking the decorator to fix a washing machine. That’s why we use professional and experienced copywriters that will work with you, ask the right questions and make sure your website’s content is accurate but with as little input from you as possible to reduce your time away from doing what you do.