What You Need To Know About Freshness Algorithm And Building Traffic for New Sites
- 31 January, 2020
- Jason Ferry
- Algorithm Updates
Many site owners and SEO experts struggle to create website traffic. This can either be because the website is completely new or due to a Google update. Fortunately, there’s a way to establish new traffic sources so websites won’t have to struggle anymore.
The Freshness Algorithm of Google
There’s the thinking that Google prefers "fresh" content, which is not entirely accurate. Such an idea originates from a misunderstanding of the "freshness algorithm" from Google, which promotes brand new content when it's trending and of the moment.
The said algorithm is about promoting trending content, and not the ones that are recently published as the publication date isn't a ranking factor. This means that you can’t get better rankings for your website by just changing a content’s publication date.
Relevance to the users is what the freshness algorithm is all about. A fresh web page is considered relevant to an individual looking for the most recent info.
Fresh Content is about Relevance
With that in mind, it does become easier to generate content ideas on relevant and being new or topical.
Recent events such as entertainment, politics, and sports are essential at a particular time. Something that's new is a great topic to quickly rank new web pages and create traffic. That's the type of content that Google may rank for a brand new web page.
This is exactly how Google explains freshness within the context of Relevance:
“…we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”
Updating Content vs. Changing Content
Here’s a statement from John Mueller last 2018 about freshness being a ranking boost:
“Fresher doesn’t mean better. Don’t fall into the trap of tweaking things constantly …when you could be moving the whole thing to a much higher level instead.
It’s more a matter of your putting out new content… that’s relevant for people who are searching at the moment and that we’re ranking them based more on that…”
According to Mueller, it’s not a good idea to change the content thinking that Google will view it as fresh. Updating and changing content are two different things.
Updating is making the content up to date, making it relevant to topics that are currently changing. On the other hand, changing the content is just about rearranging the words.
Fresh is about Relevance
SEO professionals are often concerned about how to stay relevant to Google’s algorithm. Some even focus on how to stay relevant to users when they require content regarding new topics.
One sample of information that does not change is evergreen content. For instance, the fundamentals for growing a tomato don’t change. This means that it can be a struggle for new sites to rank evergreen articles against well-known sites.
But concentrating on a trending method to grow tomatoes could be way easier. For instance, a trending technique on social media to grow tomatoes is a good topic as people will surely be interested in getting such information.
Indeed, it’s a helpful strategy for new sites to publish articles that talks about trending topics as it can attract users and make them stay for other evergreen topics.
Becoming a successful site is now possible by regularly and constantly creating content that’s relevant to users. And if you want to keep your website in good rankings, especially during lean times between algorithms, make sure to spend time in producing trending content.
Details on this blog post came from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/strategy-to-boost-traffic/345572/. Click the link for further information.
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