What is it?

Search engines like Google use sophisticated algorithms to detect the ‘best’ search results for a particular search query; which is subject to a lot of change from day to day.  

For example, the best result for a search around the life’s work of a painter will probably always be the artist’s Wikipedia page – this isn’t going to change particularly drastically.  However, some queries (think about celebrity news or sports results) are constantly changing.

For these latter types of query, Google invokes a mechanism they refer to as QDF - aka, “Query Deserves Freshness”. 

Does it matter?

Yep.

QDF means that the best results for certain subjects and queries are weighted in favour of timeliness and less dependent on the site’s trust and authority. 

Producing fresh content is its own reward, and there are myriad benefits to ensuring that visitors see a stream of frequent updates on your news or blog pages.  However, being quick to produce fresh content about developing stories or debates is a viable way to get frontpage visibility for a site that otherwise lacks the domain authority to be a credible result.  The influx of clicks and traffic for these posts creates a positive feedback loop, helping to establish the site as an authority on a particular topic.

What’s the solution?

You should try to maintain the most frequent schedule of posting that you can realistically produce.  However, if resource constraints mean that you can only manage occasional updates, simply just producing a timely comment when something happens within your industry or your clients’ industry can be very valuable indeed - and is well worth your time.