How does Google detect new and fresh content ?

What is Google’s interpretation of a fresh page or content ?

We know that to Google, fresh or new content is what it sees first. If there are two websites that has the same content, Google perceives original content as the first one it saw or spidered. This is one of the reasons why scraped content doesn’t always win on the SERPs.

It could also be a reason why “unknown” or less popular content pages tends to be scraped more. Scrapers manage to “steal” content from the lesser known or lesser search engine friendly pages and displays them first to Google and Google may think its the original content.

But scraping can’t win for long, if the “lesser known” or less search engine friendly pages are great in content, Google would ultimately come to know about it through other sources, say a good link from a reputed site.

So as far as Google is concerned, fresh content always means first content. Or content that it sees first. And this is the importance of why your new website should be indexed on Google first before you even go ahead and start pumping your content to it.

So, how does Google detect fresh content ?

- From other links pointing to the site.

- From pings.

- From sitemaps.

- From repeated crawling.

So a great way to make those Google bots crawl your site frequently will be to write new content more often, and in a steady cycle, say daily.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts where he says that adding dates to the URL is not necessarily telling Google that the content is fresh. And we webmasters don’t really need to do it, rather focus on the content updation, although adding dates on the webpage/URL is a nice usability tip !

Possibly related SEO & Social Media Articles

• News from Google: Fix duplicate content issues using canonical tag across websites
  The Canonical tag was definitely one of the best thing Google introduced to webmasters lately. But there was one limitation. You could only use it to control duplicate page issues within a website. That is if you have two pages, A and B, where B is a duplicate of A, then you could add a [...]...
• How to rank first on Google. Would you like to ?
  Funny question right ? I mean who wouldn’t want to rank first on Google. But the question is – Aren’t we focusing too much on the first rank and leaving everything else in the water ? In fact aren’t we all fancying a first rank on Google for those “dream keywords” while not giving any attention [...]...
• Take the clutter off your site design and get a fresh rush of traffic
  One of the things that gathers moss as we go along is the site design. And it’s even worse with blogs. Wordpress unfortunately has got lot of plugins and frills available for free, that we all keep on adding them until one day we find that it’s all biting back on the blog. For instance, all [...]...
• Somebody copied my content – What can I do to block them?
  Whenever someone’s copied your content,  out of ten people who have talked to me on this, nine panic ! After all, someone’s copied your content and is not a good thing. Plagiarism and scraping have been there on the web since blogging, but largely popular these days. Earlier, only high traffic, money making blogs were scraped [...]...
• Avoid duplicate content on Wordpress – How to ?
  Wordpress by default is search engine friendly – a little too much sometimes that there are lot of chances for duplicate content. Your Archives page, Feed, Index page are all sources of duplicate content. And duplicate content is a serious issue with Google, as it would throw the pages into the supplemental index -and that would affect [...]...