Fresh content..how important to SERP position?

[Ron10]

I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps.   If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?

[EGOL]

**I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps.  **

There might be a little value to "fresh" content, but quality is enormously more important.

If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?

Rankings are more a battle of "who has the best" rather than "who has the freshest".

Make "the best on the web" for your keyword, then I might say your rankings will go up.  If you are 10th best, you might make the third page, because the nine better pages will be above you, a bunch of big brands will be above you, and a few unanticipated pages will be above you.

Just improving the content will not produce immediate results.  It can take months to years for it to move up to where quality alone will rank it.  Sometimes you will never make it, just because Google can be strange or new competitors arrive with great content, your site has tons of crap that weigh it down, other people improve their pages.  So there is no guarantee.

[max.favilli]

My experience improving page copy tells me the ranking improvement is not dramatic and the exact amount depends on a variety of factors, as far as I can tell the biggest of these factors are domain authority and keyword competition, if you change content on pages of a domain with a high DA, the ranking of those pages will improve more if compared with the improvement you may get with lower DA pages.

Also the improvement seems proportional to the previous SERP position, in other words it's easier to go from pos 20 to first page, but much harder to go from pos 3 to pos 2; considering all other factors the same.

Of course if you have a page with a a lot of backlinks and a decent ranking despite the content being thin, or poorly related to the keywords you are targeting, improving it will gives you the biggest jump.

Anyway that's just my experience, no golden rule.

EDIT, now I read EGOL answer I can see I totally missed the real core question.

I have never seen a page ranking improve just because a new fresh content replaced the old one. Only because new better quality content replaced old poor content.

And when I heard and read about fresh content boost, they were always talking about new content in new pages, and that depends on the query being searched. If you browse old whiteboard friday from Rand you will find one on this topic which explain that.

In one sentence, if you publish new fresh content about a sport event the night of that sport event you may benefit from freshness boost for query related to that sport event. For obvious reasons google believe new content about a recent event is more relevant than stale one.