Google recently announced that they went live with 53 changes to their index and algorithm in April, 2012. This comes after a very volatile month of March, when they made even more (but maybe a bit less drastic) updates. The more well known of the April ones are of course the ones related to the Panda and the newer codename ‘Penguin‘. Barry from the Search Engine Roundtable made a very comprehensive list of the important changes you should a look at least to this one (instead of the larger official one), but in my opinion the the most important for us, webmasters and search engine optimization specialists are the ones about content freshness.

At least 10% of the 53 changes contained the word “freshness“! Given how much emphasis they’re putting on freshness (or rather trying to), it’s funny to see a lot of sites from 2006-2007 come to the surface for large search volume keywords. I’m sure it’s just an anomaly that will be sorted out in the next few months. So what you should take away from this is that the more high quality, fresh content you add to your site, the better!