About 6 weeks ago, Google search announced a major change to their search algorithm “that would impact roughly 35% of searches”. This change affected how “freshness” impacts Google’s search results.
This is a really big deal!
The math is pretty simple, although the numbers are huge. Google handles roughly 3 billion search queries a day, so 35% of that is 1,050,000,000 daily searches that are affected in some way by content freshness. Is that enough to get your attention?
How this impacts your blog
Even at 35% of all Google searches, this change simply might not really apply to your blog. Yet, it’s worth taking this change into account, as you may see your Google search results changing (sometimes wildly). It’s worth keeping your blog fesh for your readers, as well as the search engines.
Please, get fresh!
Create a publishing calendar
The best way to ensure you have fresh content is to create (and follow) a publishing calendar. Our minimum recommendation is publishing twice a week, although more is better. The best way to show the search engines that you’re “getting fresh” is to provide them with new content to crawl every time they visit.
Get help with content creation — turn on comments
Why do all the work yourself? As far as SEO goes, comments definitely count towards freshness. And people like reading comments, too. Comments show that your content is relevant, which is another part of what the search engines are looking for.
Refresh your old content
If you’re running short of ideas for content, take a look at what you’ve already published. Go back and update an article. This results in a page that combines both age authority and content freshness. In the eyes of the search egines, this is “relavance”, because the page has been refreshed with new content that is strong related to the existing content.
We’ve written previously about keeping fresh content on your blog. You might also download “100 Content Marketing Ideas” for a creative look at ways to generate fresh content.
Over a billion searches a day are now impacted by content freshness. . . would .0001% of that traffic be worthwhile for you? (For the math challenged reader, that equates to 100,000 searches a day.)
When it comes to the search engines, remember to “get fresh”!
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