If you are a blogger, you surely know that content freshness is important. It’s obvious, newer (updated) it’s the content, more is the value that Google, search engines and users could give to your content (if you already have a good content and SEO).
So i’m talking about your, and my, “contents” (article, pages, media, and so on) like they are Clothes and they have to be washed or maybe “refreshed”.
WEB CONTENTS – As dirty clothes
Now, Think about an article… a good one, For example a “good article/guide” about “Google How To search”. Think that this article was wrote 2 years ago… you see and also argue about “i can trust this source?It’s really old!”, then you view images in the post… the images are about an older version of Google main page. However, you decide to continue reading, you also see external links that don’t work anymore! So it’s enought, you can say: this page is “outdated”. This is a summary of a dirty cloth!
Ok, the article we have described, maybe is a really good one, but if there are problems like the ones described, we have to use a “Washing machine”, or alternatively we lose traffic, indexed pages, PageRank and last but the most important thing… USERS, follower, viewers = earnings.
WEB CONTENTS – Washing machine refreshing
How to let your content fly into the freshness? This are some tips.
First of all, we have to divide some types of content/articles. We could write about guides (evergreen content), News (one time content), Reviews (evergreen, really fast outdating). These are the most commons types of content around the web, and some are really standing long and other ones are really “one shots”.
WEB CONTENTS TIPS – Guides
Content about guides, advices and so on, are “evergreen contents”. They change a very little and only in the long time. The maintenance about this kind of content is about making sure that images, described procedures and links are updated and working.
Then, if anything is wrong or not updated, we could update the content directly (maybe a good choice) or even make a new post, updated with the latest information about that guide. I remind you, the creator of the content, if you decide to make a new post, to insert a direct link from the older to the newer post, set it at the beginning of the older post page, describing that is an old post.
Also important in guides, is to hide the “publication date” time, because sometimes users that are viewing your good content, are disturbed by the old date showed by the post and maybe they could think that the web content isn’t updated (when it also could be as new).
BUT, the most important point about outdated content is to select your links! Links are the engine of the web, if your links are poor rated or “Broken”, search engines could tear down your rating too. So don’t forget to see if your links (internal and external) are working, because this is really important for searches and users.
WEB CONTENTS TIPS – Reviews
In reviews content, we could talk as talked about guides, but we have to think that reviews could change really fast, because we are writing about something that is changing and evolving. We talk about products, websites, or even people and activities or businesses.
Users, about this kind of infos, are searching the newest one and we have to give the best and most new reviews. If we are talking about technology, the best is to follow every move of our news sources (apple, google, android, samsung…) and talk about everything by first reviewers!
For every content we create, we have also to link it with a cornerstone one, to make sure that users/viewers from search engines could get our most recent news about the topic (so we lower the bounce rate and let grow the pageviews).
WEB CONTENT TIPS – News
For the “one shots” like news or something like (breaking news), the important thing is to update them with “events timeline” where possible. Example of news content with event timeline:
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“Monday 11/11” at 11:11 am – A celebrity is in hospital! his conditions are really bad… waiting for new infos… (post published)
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“Tuesday 12/11” at 08:00 pm – the celbrity is out of the hospital (post updated)
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” Today” at 10:00 am Celebrity is at home. His conditions are better and we have an interview , see here -> link interview (a new update)
If you want to know more about (celebrity’s name) click here. (link to a cornerstone content)
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This is only an example, you can make update as you want (descending or ascending), but the point is to update about everything. To create more different contents or post for this type of news, is really something that could flood your webhosting. So maybe you can do a “post update”, and don’t a new different post. This is also good to make a group for a certain “news” and share it on social.
Important for this type of news is to “share it”, the social side is the real point about news. If News are interesting the social networks could make a great work for you. Use all of them (facebook, twitter, G+, linkeIn..) for every update, and share the same post link with different social meta description (description about the update).
These are few tips that i think are working to make a better content freshness. I hope you like my content and share it or make a comment!
