How SEO by Zaweba reads freshness and page type

Two quiet checks in SEO by Zaweba look at when a page was last changed and what kind of page it is. For freshness, it records the Last-Modified header, any dateModified in the page's structured data and the dates visible on the page. For page type, it works out what sort of page it's looking at. Both are recorded for your page and for each competitor the audit crawls.

Neither check gives you a dramatic score on its own. Their value is in comparison, and in catching mixed signals that are easy to miss.

Three kinds of date

A page can say when it was updated in several places, and they don't always agree. The Last-Modified header is sent by the web server with the page. dateModified lives in the page's structured data, where search engines can read it. Visible dates are the ones a person sees, such as Updated 3 March under a headline.

Recording all three lets you see whether your page tells a consistent story. A visible date from two years ago, a dateModified from last week and a server header from today look odd side by side, and a reader seeing an old visible date may wonder whether the advice still holds.

Why freshness matters for some terms

For some searches, people want the latest information: prices, guides that change each year, news and anything seasonal. For others, such as a definition or a classic recipe, the age of the page matters much less. SEO by Zaweba records the dates for the pages that outrank you as well as your own, so you can see whether the winners for your term tend to be recently updated.

If they are and yours isn't, that's a reason to review and update the content, not just change a date. Changing the date without changing the page doesn't help a reader, and it's the reader the page is for.

Working out the page type

Page type describes what a page is: an article, a product page, a category page, a service page and so on. SEO by Zaweba works this out for every page it checks. It matters because the comparison step looks at what kind of page is winning the results and compares it with yours. A mismatch between intent and format becomes the top priority in the plan, ahead of smaller fixes.

If the top results for your term are all guides and your page is a product page, no amount of title tweaking will close the gap. Recording the page type is what makes that check possible.

Reading the results

You'll find these details in the page checks for your page and in the comparison with competitors. The Comparison tab shows you, each competitor and the top-3 average side by side over about 35 metrics, and the All checks table can be sorted so you can find these quickly. Like every check, they come with a plain reason.

What to do with them

Make your dates agree. If your page shows a visible updated date, keep dateModified in step with it when you really change the content. If your page type doesn't match what's winning, take that seriously: it may mean writing a different page for this term rather than polishing the one you have. Then run the audit again later, and History will show whether the change moved anything.