Is freshness much of a factor in rankings?

[Broadway]

I've been reading through a lot of old WW threads regarding content, specifically content freshness vs fresh content.

From what I've read, it seems that fresh content refers to adding new individual pages to a web site. The term content freshness seems to refer to updating or adding to the information found on an individual page.

From the information and opinions in the WW threads, it seems that adding fresh content is very important in regards to a website achieving good Google rankings. This doesn't necessarily seem to be the opinion for content freshness.

I thought that webmasters added RSS feeds to pages to help with the page's freshness factor (creating an updated/fresh page without any effort). At this point, however, I don't see the overwhelming opinion that this freshness helps with an individual page's ranking in the SERP's. Does anyone have any experiences with just dealing with content freshness for a page and seeing it's ranking improving?

[tedster]

The answers will vary widely according to the nature of the site or market, and the nature of the page itself. For some sites or pages, constant freshening is not standard or expected and can actually hurt rankings. For others, if things aren't fresh enough, search traffic will dry up.

[Shaddows]

Think news sites Vs product specifications.

If your news site has a static front page, its rankings will die.

Do daily updates to product specs, and your ranking will also die. "Fiddling" with pages that should be static (in a content sense- it doesn't matter how they are served) is something I know to be problematic from personal experience. Where its happened to me, or one of my closely observed competitors, a 3-, 4-, or 5-page penalty was applied (usually a 3), for 30 days or 3 months. There seemed little connnection between the change and the penalty.