You will be able to decide when to update, merge or remove a page, and avoid changes that only fake freshness.
Some websites show "Updated January" on every article, and the date moves forward every month. Open one of those articles and you find a scheme that ended two years ago and a price nobody has charged since before the pandemic, sitting under a date that moved while the content stayed put.
Readers notice this, and Google's guidance names it. This lesson covers when a page genuinely needs updating, when it should be merged into another page or removed, and why faking freshness backfires.
A page needs updating when the facts in it change. Prices go up. A service is added or dropped. Opening hours change. A rule or syllabus is revised. Your own method improves and the page describes how you used to do it.
When that happens, change the page, and say what changed. A short line near the top or bottom, such as "Updated in March: new P5 class times and fees", tells a returning reader what is different and shows that someone is looking after the page. Record the change in your SEO log from lesson 3.5, Audit and fix one priority page, so you can see later whether it affected anything in Search Console.
Updates are also a chance to make a page better. When Priya updated her P5 page for the new year, she changed the timetable and added answers to two parent questions that had come up again and again over the previous term, so a returning parent would find something new and true.
Google's helpful content guidance includes a question aimed squarely at this: are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed? It is listed among the signs of content made for search engines first.
The logic is easy to follow. A searcher who chooses your page because it says "updated this month" and then finds stale information has been misled. It wastes your time as well, because any trick based on a date stamp is something Google's systems are trying to see through.
So change the date when you have substantially updated the content, and leave it alone otherwise. If a page has not needed changes for two years because nothing in it has changed, that is fine. A clear explanation of how heuristics work does not go out of date every month.
Many small business sites have several short pages that cover the same topic. A blog that has run for a few years often has three posts on similar subjects, each written at a different time, none of them complete. Mei Ling had "How to store a birthday cake", "Keeping your cake fresh" and "Can you freeze a cake?", each a few paragraphs long.
Pages like these compete with each other for the same searches, a problem you met in lesson 2.5, Build your keyword map, and because none is good enough on its own, merging them usually works better. Combine the best material into one stronger page, put it at the clearest address, and set up permanent redirects from the old addresses to the new one, as covered in lesson 4.4, Moves, redirects and broken pages. Mei Ling ended up with one page on storing and freezing cakes, with a section for each situation, and the three old addresses redirected to it.
Removing a page is the right call when it has no useful content, no visitors and no real replacement, such as a post announcing an event from four years ago. In that case let it return a 404, or redirect it if there is a genuinely related page.
Some topics change often enough that you should not wait to notice. Anything involving government rules, rates, caps or schemes falls into this group. A financial adviser's page on CPF contributions or tax relief depends on figures that the CPF Board and IRAS can revise. A tuition centre's page that refers to the PSLE format depends on what the Ministry of Education and SEAB currently publish.
For pages like these, set a fixed review date: every quarter, every six months, or soon after the official body usually announces changes. On the review date, check every figure and rule against the official source, update anything that has changed, and note the date checked. Better still, where a figure changes often, say plainly where to look it up and link the reader to the official page, rather than repeating a number that may go out of date.
For each existing page, choose one of four labels. Keep means it is accurate and useful as it is. Update means the facts or the offer have changed, or it could clearly serve the searcher better. Merge means it overlaps with another page and both would be better as one. Remove means it has no useful content and no replacement.
Priya went through her blog and labelled eleven posts: six keep, two update, two merge into one, and one remove. The whole exercise took under an hour and gave her a clear list of jobs. In the activity below you do the same for five of your own pages, with the reason for each label written beside it.
List five existing pages and mark each keep, update, merge or remove, with the reason for each decision.
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