The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
During my time in search, there are certain ranking factors that I’ve changed my perspective on. For instance, after coming to Go Fish Digital [1]and working on internal linking initiatives, I started to realize the power of internal links over time[2]. By implementing internal links at scale, we were able to see consistent success.
Freshness is another one of these factors. After working with a news organization and testing the learnings gained from that work on other sites, I started to see the immense power that content refreshes could produce. As a result, I think the entire SEO community has underrated this concept for quite some time. Let’s dig into why.
Reviewing news sites
This all started when we began to work with a large news publisher who was having trouble getting in Google’s Top Stories for highly competitive keywords. They were consistently finding that their content wasn’t able to get inclusion in this feature, and wanted to know why.
Inclusion in “Top stories”
We began to perform a lot of research around news outlets that seemed quite adept at getting included in Top Stories. This immediately turned our attention to CNN, the site that is by far the most skilled in acquiring coveted Top Stories positions.
By diving into their strategies, one consistent trend we noticed was that they would always create a brand new URL the day they wanted to be included in the Top Stories carousel:
As an example, here you can see that they create a unique URL for their rolling coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Since they know that Google