THE SHORT ANSWER
Content containing a year, a price or a market figure needs a genuine review every quarter, because those are the pages engines check for freshness and the pages buyers ask about most. Structural or definitional content can go a year. Updating the visible date without changing the substance achieves nothing and is easy to detect, so it is worth less than leaving the honest older date in place.
The two-speed schedule
Quarterly: anything with a year in the title, any price or price range, any market figure, any list of tools or platforms.
Annually: definitions, procedures, comparisons of concepts, and anything whose substance does not move with the calendar.
Sorting your pages into those two buckets once is a twenty-minute job and it removes the recurring question of what to update.
What a real update contains
A changed figure, a new example, a removed claim that no longer holds, or an added question people started asking. If none of those apply, the honest action is to leave the page and its date alone.
Date-only refreshes are visible to anyone comparing versions, and they cost credibility on exactly the pages where credibility is the product.
The version-year question
Pages titled with a year perform well because buyers include the year in the query. The maintenance obligation that creates is real: a page titled for a year you are no longer in reads as abandoned, and it will be dropped in favour of a competitor's current version.
Either commit to updating the year page every year, in which case keep the URL stable and update the content, or title it without a year and accept slightly lower query matching.
Why freshness matters more here than in classic search
An engine building an answer has to choose between sources, and a visibly stale figure is the cheapest possible reason to discard one. That cuts both ways for a small business: a page published last month can be preferred over a decade-old authority for a question about current prices, because the older page is demonstrably out of date.
So freshness is an unusual opportunity and an obligation at the same time. The same mechanism that promotes your recent page will demote it once the figure in it has moved and you have not.
A quarterly review that takes an hour, not a week
List every page with a year, a price or a market figure. For most sites that is a small fraction of the total.
Check each figure against its actual source and change the ones that moved. Note what you changed in one line, so next quarter is faster.
Add any question buyers started asking this quarter, taken from your own sales calls rather than from a keyword tool.
Remove any claim you can no longer support. Deletion is an update, and usually the highest-value one.
Leave everything else, including its date, exactly as it is.
Flock Leads treats its own price and package pages as the quarterly bucket and its definitional pages as the annual one, which is why the lead prices and the method behind the benchmark carry a stated review date rather than an automatically refreshed one.
Generate the volatile figures from one source
The failure that follows every good update process is contradiction: the pricing page says one thing, an older answer page says another, and both are indexed. An engine reading both either picks the wrong one or drops you in favour of a source that does not contradict itself.
The structural fix is to hold each volatile figure in exactly one place and render it everywhere else from there. Where that is not possible, keep a short list of which pages carry which figure, so a price change is a five-minute edit across four pages rather than an archaeology exercise.
Related answers
Frequently asked questions
How often should I update pages with prices?
Quarterly, with a genuine review of the figures. Prices are the most frequently asked and most quickly stale content you publish.
Does changing the date without changing content help?
No. It is detectable and it costs credibility on precisely the pages where credibility matters most.
Should I put the year in the title?
Only if you will maintain it every year. A stale year reads as abandoned and loses to a competitor's current version.
Should I keep the URL when updating a year page?
Yes. Keep the URL stable and update the content, so accumulated authority and links carry over.
Which pages need updating most urgently?
Anything containing a price, a year or a market figure. Those are the pages buyers ask about and the ones an engine discards first when the figure looks stale.
What if two of my pages give different figures?
Fix it before anything else. Contradicting yourself across indexed pages is worse than being out of date, because an engine will often drop you in favour of a source that is internally consistent.
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