Categories where "freshness" is of importance

[inhouseseo]

I know that within the past couple of months, Google as made algo updates so that freshness of content is used as more of an indicator for relevancy, and hence, rankings.

see:

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html

I understand that freshness is important across the board, but it is obviously more of a factor for certain search terms. My questions is, how can you determine if your product category (ecommerce) is one where freshness is  becoming more of a factor? Is there any way to know which terms are considered to require fresher results?

Any input is appreciated.

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hello again,

I don't have much insight on this one, but I can share a personal experience that I think is relevant. I launched an Atlanta, GA based printing website about three months ago, and due to some pre-launch SEO efforts, ranked fairly well after the initial index.

Approximately six weeks later, after a "live beta test," my team decided to upgrade the CMS (Magento), and redesign the site to add some functionalities that were missing or buggy. The site was "Under Construction" for about three days, and our rankings increased slightly after the new site was indexed, despite it having less content (products) than the previous version of the site.

Recently (about three weeks ago), we added several more products, and our rankings increased dramatically (Google - 52 improved, 0 declined in SEOMoz rank tracking, 4x increase in queries, 2.5x increase in traffic).

These updates did however coincide with other SEO efforts, so it's hard to nail down what cause the improved metrics.

But... I definitely think that the addition of new content helped. In my market (Atlanta Printing) many of my competitor's websites have been updated very little over the last several months or even years, so it doesn't require much to win that battle. In other markets, this will of course be a different story. I do think freshness of content will impact any search result, like you said, and it absolutely can't hurt to have the "freshest" site in any given market. Again, depending on the search term, fresh content could mean three days old, or it could mean 3 months old, but I advise my clients to publish new or updated content at least every 30 days.

I think it all boils down to the competitiveness of the query and the rate at which other pages competing for that query are publishing fresh content.

Thanks!

Anthony