Stale vs Fresh

Bill Slawski has done a great job by giving these examples:

• The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it's not stale. A news article about the "World Series" from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for "World Series" this October.
• While Babe Ruth is well known as a feared slugger for the New York Yankees, he's not as well remembered from his earlier days as a Boston Red Sox pitcher who threw a shutout in that 1918 World Series. Interesting information, but again, not what a searcher is likely to be looking for in an October 2008 search for "World Series."

A search engine might look at information from different sources to learn about:

1. The age of a document
2. The age of links leading to and from that document

According to Google,

Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are "no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document").

The staleness of a document may be based on:

• document creation date,
• anchor growth, traffic,
• content change,
• forward/back link growth, etc.

According to Google patent, there are 4 factors that determine the "stale" factor of a document:

• Query-based factor;
• Link-based criteria;
• Traffic - based criteria;
• User-behavior-based criteria

Query-based factor: are those factors that analyze as to which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Link-based factor: analyzes the page backlinks.

Traffic - based criteria: If there is a large reduction in traffic, then it may mean that the content or the document is stale.

User-behavior-based criteria: if people spend too little time on the page, then chances are that the contents are not fresh.

Links included: Google's Historical Data Patent, WebmasterWorld Review and SearchEngineJournal

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