What’s your freshness quotient?
What the heck is Freshness Quotient anyway, and why does it matter?
In simple terms, freshness quotient is a way of measuring how new (fresh) your content is. Search Engines use this parameter to determine rankings for the specific page and the site in general. Search Engines typically prefer to serve links to Fresh Content rather than Stale Content, simply to emulate human behavior. The age of the content is just as important as the content relevance. One assumption could also be that the newer the content, the greater its relevance.
Think of it this way: Would you prefer to buy fresh bread or stale bread?
Just as you would want to buy fresh bread, users too want to see fresh content. Needless to say, the freshest content is ranked higher by search engines than stale content. Typically, this stems from the fact that the newer the content is, the more likely it is to be relevant to the current day scenario. So, freshness of your content could also determine to a large extent its relevance. A prime example of this would be coverage of an event such as a game or current day news, or for that matter even a tip or trick. Any of these would become irrelevant or be superseded by some newer content which could very easily have been put up elsewhere on the internet.
There are however some exceptions to this rule. Some things could be old, but still be very relevant. An example would be documents of national / international importance. After all items such as the constitution of a country or an international treaty or a law could very well be ancient, but still would have the same relevance as it did even when it was originally drafted. Even though some aspects may have been superseded by later documents, the relevance of the original is not really lost in any way.
