Fresh content matters!  It has the ability to rank quickly, and get indexed quickly. However, adding fresh content works better with domains that already have authority status.

The entire point is to make sure that breaking news stories and whatnot rank in the results ahead when they’re relevant, then slowly drift away as the freshness fades.

Making the content though on an old blog is important. Trackbacks aside, Google does not visit idle sites. Or rarely does. So if you leave a blog idle for a long time then try and link to yourself, it’s going to take forever for Google to realize it changed.

You can’t just add funny pictures and quick viral content about your topic and expect it to rank, though.  I have a humor site and I remember about 3-4 years ago, if there was a news story, I could just put up a funny video/pic about it and it would instantly rank. I think Google got sick of seeing humor content whenever people tried to search for serious news stories… I update the site everyday, but Google still doesn’t come back and index my brand new, in-the-news content. I’m noticing it’s taking about 5-6 days for my content to get indexed. It’s been like this for 1-2 years.

The reason for this is simple - the amount of text added is too low to matter (in Google’s eyes).  I now suspect it’s because the textual change on a humor site when a new post goes up is quite low.

So, if you want to rank for current events, keep the amount of text high (blogs work) and the content fresh (to keep google coming back).  You’ll be ranking high everyday!