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Dear Website Owners,
Please stop adding pages to your website for the sake of having new pages on your website. I know that Google is a fickle mistress and she insists that what she wants the most is fresh content - however, you cannot possibly keep adding meaningful content at the rate you're adding it. Really, are you going to sacrifice quality for quantity? Would you rather have 10 really good pages that you keep up to date that convert your visitors, or 100 thin pages that repeat the same thing in slightly different wording and confuse your visitors because they never quite get the information they require?
The search industry has a terrible habit of trying to follow Google's words to the letter, rather than understanding the intent, and it's given you a bad reputation. The intent of Google's freshness update is not to keep you adding as much information as possible to your website - it's to make certain that the pages that appear in the SERPs are the most relevant and up to date for what the searcher requires today. When you try and get around the changes to the algorithm by generating a lot of unnecessary garbage and adding it to your website, you immediately ensure that the next algorithm update will take this into account and you'll be back where you started from.
The thing you should always bear in mind is "Will this help the visitors to my website?" If the answer is no, then Google doesn't want to see the page either and you shouldn't add it to your website as it may do more harm than good.
What I'm trying to tell you is that although freshness is important, it doesn't mean you should just keep adding pages to your website until you've got so much content your navigation explodes. Keep that to your blog. Write and react to news stories. Put out good press releases that may interest journalists and readers. Don't just keep adding pages to your website for the purpose of adding pages to your website.
If you're concerned about keeping your site fresh, then keep revisiting the content you do have and improving upon it. Update the pages you already have so they stay relevant to your products and services today. Use Analytics to understand whether the keywords that worked 12 months ago are the same or whether a few small tweaks to your keyword focus could achieve better results. If you have a reason to write a new page then write one - otherwise, exercise some restraint.
Most of all, stop showing me gibberish when we land on your websitse - because we're never going to trust a website that sounds like it was written for a search engine algorithm and not for us.
Yours sincerely,
The internet
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