Video Summary: Is freshness an important signal for all sites – Matt Cutts

Google has expressed that frequently updated sites get a ranking boost. That seems to favor blogs over company sites. How important is the signal of freshness?

Matt said that searches could be navigational, informational or transnational. Matt said the first could be searching for the location of the home page of hp, the second could be looking for how to do something and the third could be looking for something to buy.

Matt gave the example of searching for something that just happened such as an earth quake. Matt said that this could be a QDF or a query that deserves freshness. Matt said that not all queries deserve freshness and gave the example of evergreen or navigational searches.

Matt said don’t fall for the trap of believing that when you have fresh content you will rank well immediately. (See Video Summary: How to Get Better Visibility on Google by Google’s Matt Cutts)

Matt said that if you are not in a niche area that requires freshness such as news then you don’t have to worry about freshness.

Matt said that writing about evergreen content , content that doesn’t change with time, is a much better idea than targeting new topics or trends just to rank.

Matt said that you should only worry about freshness when you are competing with news sites or sites that write about things that chance often such as tech news.

Matt said that Google knows when to look for fresh content and when to look for evergreen content so you don’t have to worry about it. (See Event Summary: Google Core Search Algorithm Update 8th January 2016)