I hear the SEO gurus and the forum gods talk about content freshness all the time. They claim that you have to continually add new content to your site in order to maintain your ranking in Google.

This notion certainly deserves its place among the great SEO mythologies. Google may in fact place some weight on the freshness of content. I will honestly say that I ve never tested a fresh page against an old page to be 100% certain. What I can demonstrate, though, is that it is far more important that you have a lot of links to your page or site than that the site contain fresh content.

Let me demonstrate this with a few examples. A great one is Google s first page of results for old time radio :

The site that currently ranks #1, radiolovers.com, has been in the top search results for old time radio since it first came on the scene in 2003. I know this because I m a big fan of old time radio shows and I m constantly looking around to see what s going on in that community.

The site still looks exactly like it did back in 2003. In fact, if you visit the Internet Archive timeline for the site, you ll see that it has only rarely been updated: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://radiolovers.com

The Internet Archive indicates that the site was only updated 18 times in the past 4 years. That is very rare indeed! And I can tell you that the updates were small ones. At one point the site changed ad networks. That constitutes a change according to the Internet Archive.

Compare that to some of the results ranking under radiolovers.com. For example, oldtimeradiofans.com ranks #5, and the Internet Archive shows it being updated 24 times in less than two years. That s more than one update per month (on average). Why does Radio Lovers continue to rank so well then? Links of course!

Yes, as shown in the screenshot above, radiolovers.com has a lot of in-bound links. Almost three times more than oldtimeradiofans.com, according to Yahoo:

So even though oldtimeradiofans.com is updated more often, radiolovers.com wins the search game because it s got more links.

Let s look at another example, one that we ve already seen in the section on the themed content myth. The Internet Archive shows that ssa.gov s subdirectory on baby names has not changed since September 22nd, 2006 more than a year ago.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

Meanwhile, the ssa.gov s site is outranking thinkbabynames.com, which has been updated quite a lot since it was created in December 2004. The Internet Archive is full of updates for thinkbabynames.com.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thinkbabynames.com

How is this possible? Need I say it again? It s all about the links.

Yes, Myth #6, that you must add fresh content to rank, is undeniably false.

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