Content decay

Content decay is the slow erosion of a page's performance over time. A piece that ranked well at launch loses position as competitors publish fresher, deeper coverage, as the underlying facts go out of date, as the SERP shifts (a new AI Overview or feature changes the click economics), and as user expectations rise. Decay is normal; the discipline is to detect and reverse it before the page falls off page one.

Freshness is a real but nuanced signal. Google rewards content that is current for queries where currency matters (news, prices, rankings, anything year-stamped) and is indifferent to it for evergreen topics where the best answer does not change. The mistake is performative freshness, bumping the date without changing anything, which Google can detect and which earns nothing. The win is substantive updates: new data, corrected facts, expanded coverage, better structure.

The operational practice is a refresh cadence driven by data. Pull the pages losing impressions and position in Search Console, prioritize the ones with the most lost traffic and the most addressable causes, and update them meaningfully. Refreshing existing assets is often higher-ROI than publishing new ones because the page already has authority and history. We compute a decay curve per page and recommend refresh order.