How often should you update content for optimal SEO results?

Google has a freshness factor as one of its ranking signals. For my SEO blogs, I find that at least a daily update, sometimes two, is the best for maintaining their ranks. As for Facebook and others, I haven't thoroughly tested those. Would like to know that too.

Before you get sucked in to the 'freshness factor' bandwagon and start feverishly updating your content every day...

"Different searches have different freshness needs."

https://search.googleblog.com/2011/1...nt-search.html

You update content when you have new and improved content worth publishing.

That could be hourly to every 5 years.

I just found an answer I needed in google from a forum post in 2006.

If you are doing a site on the tallest trees in the world, you only need updating when one burns down or struck by lightening.

Freshness is not a ranking factor.

Google tries to decide what you want at any given point in time.

People mistake new, fresh happenings, news, products, etc., see new stuff rank, and think newness matters.

No, searchers have been sprung into action for something new.

Not the other way around.

I did an article on MLK, jr. like 7 years ago. Like clockwork, around every 3rd Monday in January, I get a boatload of traffic when people search for a SPECIFIC thing about MLK.

I do NOT get traffic for people searching for MLK events coming up. That would require a page that has current events.

Any Joe Blow publishing a new article, just because, is NOT getting any bump in traffic just because it's new.

People sometimes promote the idea of spamming your own blog.

I make posts and articles that stand the test of time, doing new ones only if warranted.
NOT to just cluster-F!@#$%^&* my site.

Some searches need fresh, some don't. The newest article does not need to win just because it's new.

Paul

Tim3 and Paulgl are 100% correct. There is no formula for how often you should post and the ONLY thing that gets a "freshness bump" are very timely news stories. That freshness bump is very short lived; however, there will always be a fresher news story and eventually the story will not matter to people (or search engines) anymore.

It comes down to the most basic of all search engine principles - search engines do not rank websites; they rank individual web pages. A fresh page will not help your whole website rank any better or worse than a three year old article. The content on pages is what helps them rank and the better that content is, the better chance it will have for ranking well. (Better content also tends to attract more links, too). The more pages of your website that rank well, the more authority the whole website accumulates, which DOES help individual pages rank better. That fresh newsworthy page that gets a bump today but falls quickly is not helping your website's overall authority.

Long form content is the way to go nowadays (and, in truth, always has been). Create the most comprehensive go-to source that is better than anyone else's and it will eventually climb to the top. Better, it will stay there. The more of those you create, the more your entire website will benefit. Creating one superlative long form content piece every couple of months beats creating ten 500 word posts in the same period of time.