By Kat Matfield
Regularly updating your website content is more important than ever, after another update to Google's algorithm.
The Panda update earlier this year affected 16% of search traffic, penalising sites that Google felt didn't provide searchers with high-quality content. But this new update affects 35% of searches – more than twice as many – and this time, Google's focusing on stale content.
The magic formula for SEO is easy to outline (relevant, regularly-updating, high-quality, unique content) but much harder to achieve – especially when you're trying to generate this content across hundreds or even thousands of product pages.
Panda made this job even more difficult, as businesses could no longer expect to maintain high levels of traffic if they used non-unique content, like the descriptions issued by the manufacturer or service provider and reproduced on their own site, as well as dozens of re-sellers.
And now this update sends freshness of content racing up the SEO priority list. A further complication is the fact that you can't focus exclusively on freshness - relevance and quality are still important:
Freshness is one component, but we also look at the content of the result, including topicality and quality.A Google representative, via Search Engine Land
This update is just one more argument in favour of using consumer reviews (and other user generated social commerce content) as a mainstay of your SEO strategy: they're an ideal source of content that's both relevant and regularly updated.
Our Reevoo Traffic tool takes this one step further and fully automates the content updates - so you can concentrate on the rest of your business, secure in the knowledge that a regular stream of ultra-relevant, totally unique content is keeping your site fresh and generating plenty of high-quality organic traffic.
Want to know more about using reviews and social content to power your SEO strategy? Try these posts:
Can search engines see your social commerce content?
3 ways to make sure your consumer reviews drive traffic