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Show content freshness signals

rule · freshness

Content freshness is a ranking factor for time-sensitive queries. Google's ranking systems guide (opens in a new tab) and the visible date patterns in content-date markup work best together, ensuring Google can recognize a real update instead of inferring one.

Code Examples

❌ Avoid — no freshness signals

HTML
<!-- No JSON-LD dateModified, no visible date, no Last-Modified header -->
<article>
  <h1>React Hooks Best Practices</h1>
  <p>Updated this year with new examples...</p>
</article>

✅ Correct — full freshness stack

HTML
<!-- In <head> -->
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2022-06-01T09:00:00Z">
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2024-11-15T14:00:00Z">
 
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "datePublished": "2022-06-01T09:00:00Z",
  "dateModified": "2024-11-15T14:00:00Z"
}
</script>
 
<!-- In article body -->
<article>
  <p class="byline">
    Published <time datetime="2022-06-01">June 1, 2022</time>
    · Last updated <time datetime="2024-11-15">November 15, 2024</time>
  </p>
  <h1>React Hooks Best Practices</h1>
</article>

✅ Nginx Last-Modified header configuration

NGINX
location ~* \.(html|htm)$ {
    add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate";
}

✅ Next.js — updating dateModified in frontmatter

TypeScript
// In your MDX/content file frontmatter
---
title: "React Hooks Best Practices"
publishedAt: "2022-06-01"
updatedAt: "2024-11-15"  // Update this when content substantially changes
---
 
// In page component — generate Article JSON-LD
const articleSchema = {
  '@type': 'Article',
  datePublished: frontmatter.publishedAt,
  dateModified: frontmatter.updatedAt,
}

Why It Matters

  • QDF boost: Google elevates fresh content for queries where recency matters (news, product releases, tutorials, regulations).
  • Accurate dating: Without machine-readable dates, Google guesses from HTML text — often displaying wrong dates in search snippets.
  • Competitive edge: For evergreen content you periodically update, surfacing the dateModified means Google sees your updated version as more authoritative than stale competitors, particularly when the page also shows published and updated dates clearly to users.

Freshness Signal Hierarchy

Google reads freshness signals in this approximate order:

  1. dateModified in Article/BlogPosting JSON-LD
  2. Last-Modified HTTP response header
  3. article:modified_time Open Graph tag
  4. Visible date text parsed from the page body (least reliable)

Best Practices

  • Update dateModified only when content substantively changes — adding a new section, updating statistics, fixing inaccuracies.
  • Do not update dateModified on every deploy or for minor formatting changes — Google may penalise artificially refreshed dates.
  • Ensure all three signals (JSON-LD, HTTP header, visible date) are consistent with each other.

Exceptions

  • Necessary utility or compliance pages can be intentionally brief and should not be judged by the same editorial-depth expectations as ranking-focused content.
  • AI-assisted drafting is not a failure by itself; flag unsupported claims, missing editorial review, or low-originality output instead.
  • When a page has both trust-signal issues and crawl/index problems, make the page eligible to rank first and then improve the content quality signals.

Standards

  • Use these references as the standard for the final search-facing HTML, metadata, and crawl behavior.
  • Check the implementation against Google Search Central: Ranking systems guide before treating the rule as satisfied.
  • Check the implementation against Schema.org: dateModified before treating the rule as satisfied.

Verification

Automated Checks

  • Inspect rendered HTML and HTTP headers to confirm the expected metadata or crawlability signal is present.
  • Test the affected URL with Google Search Console or equivalent tooling where relevant.
  • Re-crawl a representative page set after deployment.

Manual Checks

  • Confirm the change does not create conflicting canonical-url, robots, or structured-data signals.