Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is a page whose answer stays correct for years because the question it answers does not change: how a process works, what a term means, what a service involves. It is the opposite of news, whose value is in being current.

What stays true

A page is evergreen when the facts in it are stable, not when it avoids specifics. How a boiler is serviced, what a title deed is, how long a filling lasts: these have answers that were the same five years ago and will be the same next year, and a page that gives them precisely will keep being the answer. A page that hedges into generalities to avoid ever being wrong is not evergreen, it is empty, and an assistant asked the question will not find a sentence in it to lift. The test is whether a specific reader with a specific question would leave with the answer, today and in three years.

Evergreen and fresh are not opposites

An evergreen page still needs maintaining. A price mentioned in passing goes stale, a regulation changes, a linked page moves. The distinction from news is that the maintenance is occasional and the core holds; a revision confirms the answer rather than replacing it. A dated update note that says what changed is honest and useful. A changed dateModified over unchanged text is a claim with nothing behind it, and a crawler that stored the earlier copy can see that. The pages that carry a glossary or a how-it-works section are the natural evergreen layer of a business site; the pages about this month’s offer are not, and should not pretend to be.

A common question

Does an evergreen page still need updating, and what counts as a real update?

It does, though the work is occasional. A price mentioned in passing goes out of date, a regulation shifts, a page it links to moves, and a revision that fixes those confirms the answer instead of replacing it. A real update is one that can be described: a dated note saying what changed. Bumping the modified date over text that did not change is a claim with nothing behind it, and a crawler holding the earlier copy is in a position to notice.

Sources

No external source; stated from mechanism. No figures on this page.