refreshing-stale-content — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited refreshing-stale-content (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
Content decay is no longer a back-burner problem. The competitive-topic half-life collapsed from 12–18 months to 3–6 months [1] (see also finding-underserved-keywords/SOURCES.md [7]). Plateaus arrive faster, decay starts sooner, and refresh now beats new content for any page that has accumulated link equity. Refreshing what is already live brings 3–5× more return than writing from scratch — you keep the URL, the backlinks, the index history, and the brand trust [2].
This skill is the Mature-phase decay defense workflow. It pairs with gsc-mcp to detect impression decay automatically, then opens a single, focused refresh PR per affected page.
Core principle: preserve the URL, change the substance.
A page is a refresh candidate when any of the following fire:
| Signal | Threshold | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| GSC impressions YoY | down >20% sustained 4–8 weeks | Canonical decay signal [3] |
| Impressions falling faster than clicks | impressions −40% / clicks −20% | Early-stage decay; Google is showing the page less often [3] |
| Position drift on stable queries | 3+ spots down | SERP is reordering around fresher entrants |
| CTR rot (position flat) | CTR down ≥25% | Snippet/title aging — title rewrite alone may suffice |
| LLM citation drop | when geo-check MCP available | AI engines re-rank citations within ~14 days; ChatGPT cites pages updated <30d ago at 76.4%, Perplexity at 82% [4][5] |
| QDF mismatch | page mentions a year ≥2 years stale, or "best [X] [old-year]" | Query-Deserves-Freshness pattern punishes age hardest [1] |
gsc-mcp — 12-month window, queries + position + impressions + CTR. Compare to prior-year window. Compute YoY delta.dateModified.2026-04-26T14:30:00+00:00). Only bump when changes are substantive — Google detects and discounts cosmetic-only date bumps [7][8].refresh: <slug> (YoY −X% impressions).https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with the site's API key. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep recrawl within minutes [9]. Google does not consume IndexNow but recrawls via sitemap lastmod independently.dateModified as a reward for real edits.finding-underserved-keywords Phase 2 instead.(From finding-underserved-keywords/SKILL.md [1])
| Content type | Cadence |
|---|---|
| Time-sensitive ("Best of", comparisons, regulatory) | Quarterly |
| Industry trends / strategic guides | Every 6 months |
| Revenue-generating pages | Monthly review |
| Tier-2 evergreen | Quarterly review |
Mature phase only (12+ months, or ≥6 months of GSC data). Pre-flight check before running:
Has page been live ≥6 months? → no → use finding-underserved-keywords (Phase 1 or 2)
Does page have GSC data for prior year? → no → wait
Is there a real decay signal above? → no → no refresh; revisit in 30 daysoptimizing-on-page — actually edit the copy, headings, and intro hookadding-schema-markup — bump dateModified, validate JSON-LDfinding-underserved-keywords — for pages <12 months old or in growth phaseseo-decay-check weekly hook (see hooks/seo-decay-check.json) runs the detection sweep automatically; this skill executes the per-page responseDistilled from 2026 industry data on content decay thresholds, IndexNow adoption, dateModified semantics, LLM citation freshness, and content-refresh ROI. Full citations and verification tags in SOURCES.md.
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.