How does Google determine freshness of content?
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With the changes in the Google algorithm emphasizing freshness of content, I was wondering how they determine freshness and what constitutes new content. For instance, if I write a major update to a story I published last July, is the amended story fresh? Is there anything I can do in addition to publishing brand new content to make Google sure they see all my new content?
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Rand and iPullRank just did a great WBF on the topic:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday
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Google will find new content on your site if it is new pages or revised pages.
So, do what will work best for your visitors and that usually works best for google too.
Your visitors are the ones who send signals to google by their actions on your site, by likes, tweets, links, bookmarks and more.
Build a great site and Google will usually like it.
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I think there is one thing that overcomes freshness of content: regularly updated content. So it is not enough just to write a single page about a topoic and publish it and wait for google to index. It is considered to be fresh but it is not updated and probably will not be able to make it to the top. Look at newsportals on the other hand: they are always publishing and publishing and getting indexed several times a day.
So the consequence is that it is not enough to have fresh content once a year, but you need to have regular fresh content - the more the better. This way you are getting indexed frequently, so you don't need to worry about google finding fresh material, and your rankings will improve as well as google sees your site is up to date, it always contains the latest news (you would not like to learn form a 10 year old seo book neither).
Two things you can do besides regular writing to get indexed more often is to implement google site search as your search engine inside your site and to keep your pages as light as possible. Google always spends a planned amount os time on your site. It can make a big difference if google can index 5 or 10 pages in that given amount of time.
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