Content refresh
Substantively updating an existing page (new data, corrected facts, restructured sections) to restore or improve its relevance and rankings.
AlgorithmsQuery Deserves Freshness
Freshness systems (QDF)
Google's systems that boost recent content for queries where recency matters, such as breaking news, sports scores or evolving topics.
In full
Freshness is query-dependent: for a breaking story recency dominates, for a definitional query it barely matters. Signals include publication and update dates, crawl frequency, link acquisition rate and the behaviour of the query itself. Because artificially changing dates is a known manipulation, Google's guidance on publication dates asks for accurate, consistent dates in visible text and structured data.
Example
A tax-rate page updated the morning of a budget announcement overtakes older pages within hours.
Related terms
Top stories
A carousel of recent news articles on the SERP, drawn from sites Google's news systems consider eligible, weighted heavily toward…
Google News sitemap
A specialised sitemap containing only articles published in the last two days, using the news namespace to speed discovery for Google News…
Content decay
The gradual decline in a page's search traffic as it ages, competitors update, intent shifts or the underlying information goes out of date.
Google ranking systems
Google's documented list of the systems that generate rankings, distinguished from one-off 'updates' to those systems, and including…