Keeping your content fresh is becoming increasingly important for franchise marketing companies wanting to keep their brand visible in Google rankings. Don’t worry: you’re not going to have to rewrite every page of your website each month just to keep your rankings alive. So how does Google determine the freshness of your content?
Google determines page freshness in part according to the following 6 factors:
- Inception date. Google assigns each page of content a freshness score based on the day of its inception. This isn’t necessarily the day your page is published, but rather the day that Google first becomes aware it exists. Though business owners do not necessarily have control over when this occurs, franchise marketing companies can influence Google indexing using certain assets. Sharing links via Google+ is one way to draw their attention to new pages.
- Amount of change. Pages can renew their freshness score to some degree when changes are made. You don’t need to rewrite the entire copy, but large amounts of change will always be more influential than minor changes. In fact, Google sometimes ignores nominal changes entirely. If you think that updating a hyperlink is enough to trigger a renewed freshness score, think again!
- Importance of change. Google awards more “freshness” factor to pages that have undergone substantial changes. Changing less important aspects – JavaScript, comments, navigation, date/time tags, and so on – will yield much less significant results than rewriting the main body text.
- Rate of change. Content that changes more often will be scored differently than content that changes infrequently. A blog or news website will not be given a significant “freshness” boost because the entire model is based on having fresh content. On the other hand, a government website with infrequent but weighty posting will get a huge “freshness” boost if a page is changed.
- New page creation. Pages that add new pages at a high rate earn a much higher freshness score than sites that add new content alone. Some franchise marketing companies recommend adding 20-30% new pages each year, but this isn’t necessary so long as fresh signals are being sent out via updated content and fresh links.
- Rate of link growth. Google doesn’t only determine freshness according to the amount of new content being added. If a webpage experiences an increase in link growth, Google may aware you a freshness boost. However, like all linking practices, any kind of exploitation is going to get your site penalized.
It’s important to realize that certain pages benefit more from “freshness” than others. Sometimes, older pages get more attention, and are considered to be more authoritative when they’re longstanding. 360’s franchise marketing team can help you determine whether page freshness is a goal you ought to pursue – learn more about our services at https://www.360businesslocal.com/services/, or call (416)-619-7935 for a free consultation.