Field Guide
Content Freshness
Content freshness is how recently your pages were published or updated — it's a ranking factor for searches where recency matters, like news, events, and 'best of [year]' queries, though it matters far less for evergreen content.
Why it matters for your site
For searches with built-in recency intent — news, trending topics, events, and anything implicitly time-bound like 'best CRM 2026' or 'latest iPhone' — Google favours newer content. For those queries, an up-to-date page has a real edge over a stale one.
But freshness matters far less for evergreen content. An authoritative 'what is X' explainer from three years ago can still comfortably outrank a thin page published yesterday. Freshness is one signal among many — not a master switch, and never a substitute for quality.
The practical read: if most of your site hasn't changed in years, that reads as a low-maintenance signal to both crawlers and visitors — especially in a fast-moving field. It's worth addressing as a sign that your site is active and cared for, not because old content is somehow penalised.
How to check it yourself
- Check whether your important pages show a visible publication or 'last updated' date. It helps readers judge relevance and gives search engines a clear signal.
- View the page source and look for datePublished and dateModified inside the page's JSON-LD schema (in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block). These tell search engines precisely when content was written and last changed.
- Check the <lastmod> dates in your sitemap.xml — they should reflect genuine updates. Stamping every page with today's date on every crawl trains search engines to ignore the signal.
- Kweri's sitemap analysis flags when most of a site's content appears stale, based on its sitemap dates, in the Technical SEO section of your report.
Technical detail
datePublished and dateModified are properties of Article and BlogPosting schema in JSON-LD. They give search engines a precise, machine-readable record of when a page was created and last meaningfully updated.
The <lastmod> element in sitemap.xml reports when each URL last changed. To be useful it has to be accurate — sites that auto-stamp every page with the current date teach search engines to disregard it.
Google has said it uses freshness as one of many ranking signals, weighted by query type (often described as 'query deserves freshness'). It rewards genuine revision, not cosmetic date changes — substantively updating a page matters; changing the date alone does not.
For the guidance on date markup and how Google uses it, see Google — Publication dates and freshness →
Related
Structured data is code you add to a page that tells search engines and AI answer engines exactly what your content is about — making it significantly more likely to be cited, featured in rich results, or extracted as a direct answer.
robots.txt and sitemap.xml are the two files search engines look for first: one tells crawlers which parts of your site they're allowed to access, and the other hands them a map of every page worth indexing.
See Content Freshness on your own site
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