Tips on "freshness" and "updating" - from the horse's mouth

Watch this 3-minute video by Matt Cutts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4hH4ZQ_19k&feature=plcp

Really interesting! To sum up: forget about updating the content of your articles, unless you are writing about breaking news or maybe about latest fashion. Evergreen don't need no updates and won't profit from any.

Exactly. Unless you have newsworthy updates for a newsworthy article, don't bother. 

Hmm I tend to disagree a bit with the don't update evergreen content. Some of my articles that are evergreen on the other site do better when updated. But, I'm off to check the video out now,

LB, over at HP writers have been updating since the idle feature was introduced, traffic there has started to completely crash, which, admittedly could be due to a number of factors, but it was interesting to hear Mat Cutts describe it as a "pitfall" to add a few new words or a new byline to content which did not need to be updated.  

Yup, he's the boss :) Just listened to what he had to say. 

Oh Google.  It's a good job that I'm neither paranoid nor think I'm the centre of their universe.

I've spent most of this evening up-dating old articles.  Admittedly because they were written when I was even more of a noob and therefore were full of schoolgirl errors.

Google's timing is spot on, as ever.

:p

I don't think this is about NOT updating articles, if you think you have something interesting to add - even if they're evergreen articles.

I think it's about not putting too much value (in terms of ranking improvements) on updates per se, unless the article topic requires frequent, updated content.

You know, like on Squidoo, you could upgrade your internal ranking by adding a few words and republishing the page. (Doesn't work all that well anymore, these days.) But that had nothing to do with your SERP rankings.

Simply put: Google loves fresh content, when the topic is such that the readers would expect to find the latest news, or findings, or whatever has changed since the page was first published.

Updating content on evergreen pages, however, does not count that much toward your rankings, even though Google has nothing against it. 

What about the SERPS - generally the more recent articles appear at the top.

I try to write my articles so the only updating they need is possibly the products as better ones come out etc... and comments... can someone define an "evergreen" article for me, I've heard the term but never thought to look it up- I'm assuming it means an article that can organically stand on it's own because it's well built, concise, and informative (and timeless). Is this it?

Jerrico, evergreen is something that doesn't change with time. Let's say you're writing an article a guide on decorating Christmas trees, that's not going to change in the years to come. You may just come up with a few new ideas etc. But, basically it's evergreen. 

Ah! that makes sense... so I did know what it was, just never really officially connected the definition with the concept. Everygreen all the way baby!

Haha I'm glad that silly example cleared the point

Christmas trees (and their decorations) are only evergreen before they are cut down. After that they cannot stand on their own merit.

So an evergreen article would be a tree still planted in the ground, alive, and covered in decorations? :)

humagaia: 10/02/2012 - 03:03 AM

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Christmas trees (and their decorations) are only evergreen before they are cut down. After that they cannot stand on their own merit.

:P I'm glad that Jerrico got the point, I only wanted to explain it to him

Thanks Lobobrandon :)

whew... I've been publishing 2-4 wizzles a day for the last several days- it's taking a lot out of me!  but they are freshly written wizzles (not migrations)... I absolutely love building wizzles from scratch, migrating is ok, but it takes the fun out.

Also Amazon has been steadily putting amazing ideas in my in box (their upsells)... I think I've created 30 wizzles based specifically on products from amazon- I have to stop myself from reading those mails until I catch up- I can't help but make more! ahhhhh.

Jerrico

I've been really busy lately and haven't written any for a long time. Just got a few clients that I write for so busy on that during the day whenever I'm off from University :)

I feel you there, I have to write 2 articles a day for my boss, a few from the content mill to generate some extra money (you write they pay you biweekly for all you do), and by the time I get to Wizzley I'm way tired of writing... I negotiated with my boss to let me just write the full 10 articles a week on monday and spend the rest of the week (for that time) writing wizzles... so here I am..

I'm in a race to have the most Wizzley articles published, it may take me a year but I think I can do it- (this is my motivation not money- money is next years motivation, when I have a viable published article portfolio live...)... this of course requires that each article be absolutely perfect because I don't ever want to touch an article twice other than to leave a reply to a comment haha.

Ok a bit out of context here (considering the topic of the thread); but, you've got a lot of competition