It makes intuitive sense that stale web pages that haven’t been updated in a long time and haven’t garnered any new inbound links of note in a long time will not be looked on as favorably by Google. Indeed, Lawrence Deon makes a case for this in his analysis of a Google patent (filed 12/31/03) that has recently come to light. Yet, somehow, I’m not convinced. In fact, I see evidence to the contrary. I will elucidate, but first, let’s read what Leon has to say about the role of “freshness” in determining placement in Google search results:

In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. What’s new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page. For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn’t changed and the content is not updated or “stale”. According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.

• The frequency of all web page changes
• The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
• Changes in keyword distribution or density
• The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
• The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
• The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).

Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.

Leon’s points sound quite plausible, yet I have anecdotal evidence showing that freshness apparently has no bearing on rankings. Here’s a specific example: a cobweb of a website that we (Netconcepts) built on a shoestring budget over 3 years ago but haven’t hardly touched since then, Stepbystepwebmarketing.com, is still maintaining top positions in Google. For many months in 2002 and 2003, the site maintained Google rankings of:

• #1 for web marketing conferences
• #1 for web marketing workshops
• #1 for email marketing conferences
• #1 for email marketing workshops
• #1 for web site marketing conferences
• #1 for web site marketing workshops
• #1 for marketing workshops

Then, all of a sudden during one of Google’s famous algorithm shifts over a year ago, the site’s rankings dropped dramatically. However, “never say die”, as they say…. the site ended up coming back, nearly as strong as in 2002! Currently the site’s Google rankings are:

• #1 for web marketing conferences
• #2 for web marketing workshops
• #1 for email marketing conferences
• #1 for email marketing workshops
• #4 for web site marketing conferences
• #4 for web site marketing workshops
• #5 for marketing workshops

Pretty impressive rankings for an old cobweb promoting a conference from 2002, eh? Looks to me like you can throw a site up and then abandon it for years and still dominate top positions in Google (assuming of course that the site you “throw” up is search engine optimal and has good inbound links). Hmm… Go figure! Remember, just because some technology is detailed in a patent application doesn’t mean that they’re using it!