A refresh protocol that updates substance, not just dates

A refresh protocol that updates substance, not just dates

The question: a YMYL page is aging — what refresh sequence restores its trustworthiness rather than performing freshness by editing the timestamp?

The QRG treats outdated information on YMYL topics as a real trust problem, and Google has separately discouraged fake freshness signals. A substance-first protocol:

— Re-verify every factual claim against current primary sources. Guidelines change; a recommendation that was correct three years ago may now be wrong, which is worse than merely old.
— Identify claims that have been superseded and replace them, noting the change where transparency serves the reader.
— Re-confirm that cited sources still exist, still say what you claimed, and haven't themselves been retracted or updated.
— Have a credentialed reviewer re-review YMYL substance and re-attribute the review with a current date and their name.
— Only after substantive revision, update the visible "last reviewed" date — and only if the date reflects real review.

Caveat: changing a date without changing content is the failure mode this protocol exists to prevent. There is no evidence that timestamp manipulation produces durable ranking benefit, and on YMYL topics a fluent-but-stale page is a trust liability whatever its displayed date.

What we still don't know: how Google's systems weight content freshness against established page authority for queries where currency genuinely matters — the trade-off between a recently updated newcomer and a long-established but slightly dated authority is not publicly specified.