Content Freshness
How recently content was created or updated, a ranking factor for time-sensitive queries where recency is part of user intent.
Definition
Content freshness refers to how recently content was created or meaningfully updated, and how this recency affects its ranking potential for queries where searchers expect current information. Google's QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, described in a 2007 patent, identifies queries that benefit from fresh content and boosts recently updated pages in the results for those queries.
Not all queries need fresh content. A page on "how photosynthesis works" loses no value over time — evergreen topics are unaffected by QDF. But queries like "best smartphones 2024," "COVID travel restrictions," or "Python best practices" have a clear freshness requirement: users expect recent information, and outdated content may have incorrect or misleading data.
Practical freshness strategies: add a publication date and last-reviewed date visible to users (Google reads these as freshness signals); update the page's content substantively when refreshing (changing one sentence while updating the date is not enough — Google assesses content-level changes); use schema markup's dateModified property to signal updates to search engines; and plan annual or biannual content audits to identify pages where information has gone stale. The <lastmod> tag in your XML sitemap can also help prioritize Googlebot's re-crawl of recently updated pages.