Freshness

Freshness

Quick SEO win anybody who has a website with articles can do.

Take your best-performing articles from the last couple of years and update the date to this year.

Google looks to be overvaluing freshness in its algorithm, even showing results when its AI knows the content is out of date.

Here’s what I mean.

This ranks #1 for:

  • BetaList launch price.
  • BetaList advertising price.
  • How much does it cost to launch on BetaList.
  • So many others.

The article was originally published in 2019 but has been updated to say published this year.

The only thing that was changed from the original version was the date published.

The content is entirely out of date. It says the price to advertise on BetaList for a day is $99. In 2019, that was the price. Now it is $999.

Even crazier, Google’s own AI, Gemini, knows this:

Asking Google's Gemini how much it costs to launch on BetaList.

Not to mention, when it comes to launching on BetaList (not advertising) the price is $300.

So much about this article is wrong but it’s being overvalued because it once had high engagement and now has a recent date published.

By the way, launching on BetaList for $300 is a steal. This is from my marketing journal on the day I first tried BetaList (the price was $129 back then):

This was for our product Reverb, which was originally named Speek.

I was nomadding through Belarus and using BetaList and Product Hunt to get users all throughout the United States.

That BetaList launch got us users for weeks and had us written about in several US edtech blogs.

The backlinks from those edtech blogs set the foundation for the SEO I did for Reverb, which is how I learned Bottom-of-Funnel SEO.

But back to BetaList – $300 for that launch also would have been completely worth it.

And finally, back to SEO, changing your date published to this year is about as quick a win as you can get. I’d recommend updating any facts that are out of date, but as I just showed, it looks like Google doesn’t care.

Once you update, just make sure you submit to Google Search Console afterward.

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Edward Sturm

Edward Sturm is an entrepreneur, SEO, writer, and digital video and image producer.

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