<aside> 🚨 Want more notes like this? Subscribe to weekly strategy emails: seonotebook.com

</aside>

Ross Hudgens coined the phrase “freshness distance” and the concept makes a lot of sense!

You can read his full post here.

Skeptical about freshness? Check this out:

Chris Long on LinkedIn: Freshness is an underrated part of Google's algorithm. To test this | 33 comments

What is freshness distance?

When you look at the first page search result, take a looks at difference between the most recently updated post and the oldest post on that SERP. This is known as the “freshness distance."

The distance tells us a lot about what that SERP requires in terms of frequency of updates in order to be competitive.

Take a SERP like “best headphones”

At the time of this note (May 4th 2022) , the oldest post on the SERP was literally from only from February 14th:

Untitled

Untitled

The distance between these posts is 4 months. So freshness distance = 4 months.

So if you’re trying to compete in this SERP and you’re not constantly updating your post, you’re probably not going to rank. You’ll need to update a regular cadence in order to compete.