90 Digital CEO Nick Garner talks about another part of Trust Optimisation, and the most important is that you have a Fresh New Content on the site and have a Real Date Markers in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Short intro to Trust Optimization.
Along with on site optimization and link acquisition, there seems to be a third element to ranking well on Google, it’s called Trust Optimization. Trust Optimization is based on the information we have got from anecdotal evidence on click through rates and rankings along with explicit guidelines from Google stating what they are looking for in a trusted website.
On with the post…
Following on from making sure your site is properly maintained, it makes sense that users will trust you more if they see a steady flow of new content on your website. Course there are some sites which will forever be static, but on the whole most sites should have fresh content to show that it is well maintained and keeping up with the times.
Since google has to rely on what it says on the page, date markers are really important.
This is a date marker:
Google say in their quality rater guidelines:
“Exercise caution relying on dates: Some webpages automatically display the current date. Rather than just looking for a recent date, search for evidence that effort is being made to keep the website up to date and running smoothly.
Finally, the types of updates needed depend on the purpose of the website and type of content. We expect news websites to add articles very frequently and to date each article. Typically, published news article content doesn’t change (unless to correct for errors), but new articles are added. On other websites, individual pages created on a topic are updated as new information becomes available. Wikipedia is an example of this. For these kinds of sites, we would expect individual pages to be updated as information changes.”
If you want to fake it in WordPress, here are a few interesting plugins
https://wordpress.org/plugins/auto-post-scheduler/
This plugin will schedule ‘auto post checks’ to publish new posts and/or recycle old posts automatically.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-old-post-date-remover/
Removes the date stamp from older posts (you choose how old), while leaving the date stamp on newer posts. Ideal for blogs with evergreen content.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/old-posts-highlighter/
This plugin will randomly choose an old post in your WordPress database and reset its publication date.
And if you love your PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
and you can hack a php snippet like this:
Great trick, but….
So whilst there is a temptation to fake the date markers, remember google keep a cached version of your page.
If they make such a big deal of identifying fake date markers, it makes sense the algorithm is tracking or will track this kind deception.
New content simply says i’m home and i’m looking after my website and i care about my users. That’s why it’s a valid trust signal.
Nick Garner is founder of 90 Digital, the well-known and respected iGaming search marketing agency.
Nick is obsessed with SEO and whatever it takes to rank sustainably on Google.
