Keeping Your Web Site Content Fresh for the Search Engines

rigister now!  
One of, admittedly, many factors that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing look at when they calculate how to rank a Web page is the so-called “freshness” of the content. In theory, the search engines will tend to reward pages whose content is frequently updated while pages whose content rarely (or never) changes are considered stale and might take a hit in the rankings. Of course, this is just one thing to consider when you optimize your site for search engines, and if you’re using an SEO program like Go Daddy’s Search Engine Visibility, you can easily analyze your site’s search engine readiness in such areas as: keyword selection, tags, links, ranking, and much more. But content freshness is harder to measure.
Nevertheless, there are few things you can keep in mind:
Clearly, it’s opportune for you to keep your content fresh when you’re pursuing a top search engine ranking. But how and to what extent you really need to do it obviously depends on the type of content on your page. In a nutshell: Some content naturally gains from freshness, while other types will do just fine even if you don’t update it all the time.
For example: If your site is in any way related to current events, such as politics, sports, scientific research, etc., there’s always something going on, so if your content just stays the same for long stretches of time, it is indeed becoming stale — and Google and the other search engines will notice it. On the other hand, if your site is dedicated to, say, the history of the Roman Empire, then you can certainly update it if new research or new excavations deliver ground-breaking new material, but you don’t really have to write a new entry every day about the assassination of Julius Caesar! Of if your site is all about the fabled 1970 Soccer World Cup or the equally famous 1986 World Series, then you can certainly get away with nurturing existing content instead of constantly adding new stuff.
Still, adding well written, inspired, informative, entertaining content not only will tend to impress the search engines; it will also be appreciated by your visitors who will then come back for more — even if you don’t see an immediate boost in your search engine rankings.
So, to summarize: Fresh is good; stale is often, but not always, bad. Use your good judgment, and simply focus on building and maintaining a great Web site.