Last modified date is important, older is better

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I've noticed that it's harder to rank new content recently if it doesn't garner immediate social reaction. To test that theory I went to a handful of previously well ranked pages on the same site that were each over 5 years old and I hit the edit button and then saved the page. There was absolutely NO content changed but the editing process refreshed the last modified date from 5+ years ago to several days ago in both the http header and the sitemap.

In the several days since doing that ALL of these pages have fallen in rank considerably after being stable for years.

Age of page, or more accurately time since last being modified, is a ranking factor. I can repeat the above and reach the same outcome to verify that.

[lucy24]

I think there are other interpretations. One is that for 5 years g### got a steady diet of 304's and never bothered to "look" more closely at the page. The change forced them to re-crawl the page and re-index from scratch. Somewhere there's a page just waiting to jump in the other direction.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You may be right, there can be many interpretations, but the pages have been crawled many, many times.