Every content library has a quiet problem: pages that once ranked are slowly sliding. Nobody notices because no single day looks bad — the decline only shows up as a trend. The teams that win treat refresh as a scheduled discipline, not a rescue mission.
What a decay score looks at
- Click and impression trend — a sustained downslope in Search Console.
- Position trend — average position drifting off page one.
- AI-citation trend — pages that used to get quoted and no longer do.
- Age and thinness — old, short pages decay fastest in competitive topics.
Refresh, don't rewrite
A refresh is surgical: update the facts and figures, tighten the answer-first opening, add the sub-questions that now matter, and re-earn the internal links pointing at it. A grounded rewrite that respects what already ranks beats a from-scratch rewrite that throws away equity.
Make it a queue, not a fire drill
Rank your library by decay score, work the top of the list every cycle, and re-measure after each refresh to confirm the page recovered. Decay is inevitable; being surprised by it is optional.
Sources and review basis
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- SearchVoro attribution limitations
Reviewed against the linked primary documentation and, where relevant, the current SearchVoro implementation. Sources support context and methodology; they do not turn an observed association into a causal claim.
About this byline
“SearchVoro Team” identifies collaborative product and engineering material, not an invented individual author. Named contributor and reviewer profiles will be added only with the person's approval.