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1. Updated in the past 3 months
2. Updated in the past 6 months (except past 3 mo)
3. Updated in the past year (except past 6 mo)
4. Updated in the anytime (except past year)
You may reveal all these categories in the G's Advanced Search in the line started with "Date ..."
B. Many surfers use the Advanced Search with the setting "Return web pages updated in the past 3 months". So, this group of Google users will never see sites that are older than 3 months.
C. Thus, if you update your site every 3 months, the Google will never drop it from SER for the reason of old content. Otherwise, sometimes it'll be dropped in spite of your PR9 and fine art of SEO.
D. Now, the question is whether it’s really necessary (for the sake of SERP only) to update site every week or even every day?
It really depends on what the content is as to whether it matters that it has been updated recently.
A good point, madweb... and it illustrates why this feature should remain in "advanced search" and not be the default. The number of queries in which the "last updated" date of the content is relevant is relatively small. In most cases, it makes sense to just let the algorithms decide what content is most relevant for the query.
TomWaits,
You can see those sites using Regular Goo search. However, if somebody uses Advanced Search with the Date setting other than Anytime, then all those sites will be dropped.
And if that's more than 3% of Google searchers, I'd be quite surprised.
It's likely < 1%.
I think YOUVE been drinking Tom, not your piano..
more likely less than 0.1%
What if my site was about the "Ancient History of the Widget". Ancient history is ancient history and not to be updated daily, weekly or monthly.
So a site like this will get dropped?
Come on Google.....open your library for everyone!
See my message #32 above.
And if that's more than 3% of Google searchers, I'd be quite surprised.
It's likely < 1%.
TomWaits, all right…
Now, let us consider two hypotheses:
1. A site may be dropped from SER by surfer if he changed date preference from anytime to past 3 months.
This hypothesis is evidently true, however it actually effects only about 1% of Google searchers.
2. A site may be dropped or more likely pushed down in SER by Google itself.
This hypothesis may be true or false
If it is false, it means Google doesn’t worry about fresh content… Contradiction!
If it is true, it works in 100% of Google searchers!
If someone uses the customized date feature, he's / she's just looking for fresh stuff - something like news, or newly added stuff, right? So why the hell should i manipulate that? How about the user's satisfaction if users search for fresh stuff and my ole site just offers a newly added space as it's only fresh content?
Allthough i think in general it's a good idea to update a site often, it shouldn't be cheated just to manipulate freshness. It should be real freshness. Strange things you're discussing ...
Jane and Joe wouldn't search for fresh pages by default, or?
When Fresh listings first started, this type of thinking was very useful. A page would be included Fresh for a day or two, then it would revert to last month unless it changed. By changing it each day, you could have the Fresh listing for most of the month.
I don't think it's helpful now. If our content changes then we want to be found by our new words, otherwise the deep and Fresh listings don't make a difference in my opinion.
It's a tiny proportion of visitors who filter by date, judging from some of our logs it's less than one twentieth of one percent.
Method:
# grep "as_qdr" combined-access.3 ¦ grep "q=" ¦ grep google ¦ grep -v "qdr=all" -c
68
# grep "q=" combined-access.3 ¦ grep google -c
169444
Of those 68, 47 were filtering for the past 3 months, 10 for the past 6 months and 11 for the past year. That sample's probably too small though.
Comment from Matt Cutts at the Pubconference:
We have some tens of millions pages getting the Fresh treatment (or words to that effect).
Lets say 30 million on a 3 billion index = 1% of the webpages.
Its definitely worthwhile to have some update/changes on your pages, but new, fresh incoming links to your pages help as much if not more for the preferential treatment, in my opinion.
C. Thus, if you update your site every 3 months, the Google will never drop it from SER for the reason of old content. Otherwise, sometimes it'll be dropped in spite of your PR9 and fine art of SEO.
Just one fresh link towards it every three months might be enough, without any change at all on the page. For example why change the original Pagerank papers?, why take it out of the index if others are still linking to it (topical).
