One of the main purposes of generating and promoting content is to satisfy search queries of your target audience. Without users actively searching and “looking” for your content, there is no point to publish anything. Hence, it also makes sense that whatever you publish must be up to date, otherwise, Google will give preference to more recent and fresher content.
Well… That’s not always the case.
Let’s say you are running a news website. Now, it’s common knowledge that news websites need to be updated several times each hour in this day and age. That is why news publishing websites have a big team of writers, editors, and sub-editors. Similarly, If you have a coupon website that provides new discount coupons every day, you need to update regularly, otherwise, you will start losing viewers.
The aforementioned websites are just a few examples of websites that need frequent updating, i.e. fresh content.
Let’s say you have a “top 10” blog that lists the top ten products for a particular year. So, a possible blog post may be, “top 10 wifi-routers of 2019.” Now this list will not gather much attention in the year 2020. However, you can keep your content fresh by updating the post and changing the title to “top 10 wifi-routers of 2020.”
This way, you won’t have to write a whole new article/post in order to keep your content fresh.
If you are in a constant state of worry that your content will become outdated and that you will start losing readers, then you should focus on creating “evergreen content” that is not time-sensitive. Creating evergreen content will ensure that your content remains fresh, useful and relevant regardless of the passage of time. Such content can come in many forms, including, but not limited to “how-to posts”, resource listings, and strategies.
Although not absolutely necessary, the aforementioned strategy goes a long way towards ensuring your blog/content platform’s relevancy.
The myth that you can only rank with fresh content holds true for certain websites. However, if you are in an industry that does not require frequent updates, then your ranking will be just fine.