Short answer: there is no freshness algorithm, and no search system scoring whether your business is still active. What actually matters is much narrower: whether the page is accurate today. Content decays because the facts it states stop being true, and the fix is a real review — not a changed date. Google’s own guidance is that updates should be substantive, which makes the cosmetic date bump the one approach guaranteed to achieve nothing.
What “freshness” actually means
Search has always returned fresher pages when they exist, and has always declined to be a publication with an expiry date. Nothing about generated answers changes the fundamentals: a page that states something true and current is useful, and a page that states something no longer true is not.
The confusion comes from conflating two different things. One is the page’s date — when it was written. The other is the page’s accuracy — whether it is right now. For a service business, accuracy is the one that decays and the one nobody notices.
Concretely, a page can be three years old and perfectly accurate, and it can be six weeks old and badly wrong. Age is a proxy; accuracy is the thing itself.
Key takeaway: judge freshness by reading the page, not by looking at the date on it.
How content decay actually happens
Decay is not mysterious. It follows predictable causes, and Ahrefs has documented them properly. [1] The usual sources are:
- The examples moved on. Your pricing model, your tooling, your process. The page describes an approach nobody would use now.
- The subject changed. Laws, standards, platform behaviour and competitor expectations all move, and a page written confidently about the old version becomes quietly misleading.
- The format dated. Screenshots of an interface that no longer exists. Tables implying a comparison landscape that has since consolidated.
- The links rotted. Outbound references to dead or repurposed pages make a page look abandoned to anyone checking it.
None of these announce themselves. A page does not go from correct to incorrect at a moment you can observe. Which is why the useful approach is a scheduled read rather than a response to a drop in traffic.
Why the date bump backfires
The most common “freshness” tactic is changing the visible date or the dateModified field without changing anything else. It is worth understanding why this is a bad idea rather than merely a useless one.
Google’s guidance on republishing and on helpful content more broadly is explicit: [3] make substantial changes rather than cosmetic ones, because a date with no substantive update behind it is a misrepresentation of the page. [2]
There is also a direct cost for you. A real modification date is a signal a reader uses — “this was checked eight months ago” is a reason to phone you about pricing. Remove it, and you have spent the reader’s only cheap way to judge how current you are. A page with an honest old date is more trustworthy than a page with a new one and identical content.
A quarterly review that takes about an hour
Here is a routine that is proportionate to a small business and catches almost all of it:
- Open your five most important pages. Ask of each: what on here would a customer find wrong today? Prices, coverage, turnaround, the process, the tools. Fix what you find.
- Date the review honestly. Update the visible date only on pages where you actually changed something.
- Check the outbound links on those pages. Replace dead ones or remove them.
- Look at traffic per page, not sitewide. Decay is visible on a single page well before it moves your totals.
For a blog, the same idea with a longer interval: identify the posts that still get traffic, confirm they are still right, and update those. Leave the rest alone. A substantial portion of an old blog is permanently fine and will never need touching, and reviewing it annually is a poor use of an hour that would be better spent refreshing a service page.
Refreshing beats publishing, for most sites
For a small business the constraint is time, not ideas, and the highest-return use of an hour is almost never a new post.
A page you already have may already rank, may already have links pointing at it, and may already be in someone’s bookmarks. Refreshing it borrows all of that; a new post starts from nothing. If you have an existing page that answers a question well and is simply out of date, you are looking at the cheapest available improvement.
Emerge content is the same idea applied to writing: an article that does not need a publication date because the subject does not change is not neglecting freshness, it is doing it correctly. [4] A guide to how to read a boiler, or what a fixed quote includes, or how to prepare for a site visit — these are evergreen by nature, and they should not be touched because a quarter passed.
When a page should go, and when it should stay
Three options, in the order you should try them:
- Refresh it. The default. Update the examples, the pricing, the process. This resolves the majority of cases.
- Consolidate. Several thin posts on the same subject become one good page, with the others redirecting to it.
- Delete. Only when the page is actively wrong, or covers something you no longer do. Deletion has real costs — lost links, lost history, and sometimes a 404 where a relevant page used to be — so it is the last option rather than a clean-up step.
Content pruning has genuine logic behind it, and it is worth reading the case properly before deleting anything. [5] The important qualification for a small site: most decay is fixable by editing, not by removal.
What to do first
- Pick your five most important pages and re-read them this month. Do not touch the dates yet.
- Write down what is wrong on each. There is usually something.
- Fix the wrong things, then date the pages honestly.
- Set a quarterly reminder. Decay is invisible from inside, which is the whole reason it needs a schedule.
How this connects
- Pruning for scale covers when deletion is and is not the right call.
- A justification web covers attaching dates to claims so decay is visible.
- Clicks versus direct answers covers why accuracy carries into summaries.
- Content audit covers building the review into a monthly routine.
