According to Lee Odden, the SEO concept of "fresh content" has been distorted by a convoluted game of telephone—one person giving information to the next, each with his or her own interpretation, until the final person receives a definition quite unlike the original.

"I'm sure the genesis was something like: Someone told someone else at a conference and they posted it to a forum where someone read and blogged it and then someone else tweeted it whereupon someone else blasted it via Ping.fm and Hootsuite," he explains in a post at the Online Marketing Blog. "This sort of cycle repeats over and over again."

In the process, we've wound up with the erroneous belief that "fresh content" is achieved by tweaking pages for the sake of tweaking pages—with hopes that we'll attract search-engine crawlers and increase search visibility.

In fact, argues Odden, truly "fresh content" includes:

• Updated news
• Updated links
• Refined on-page keywords

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