Google have taken on some much needed Freshness tips
Google yesterday announced a major algorithm change which they say helps to improve the ‘freshness’ of results. It’s estimated this will impact roughly 35% of search results – Over 20% more search results than the Google Panda update (12%).
Up to date and relevant content will now be given higher weight when determining ranking for temporal searches. For example, when searching for the Carlton vs Essendon score, you’ll want today’s or the most recent score – not a result from last season. If you’re searching for product reviews, you’ll want recent reviews rather than those from years ago.
I’ve found myself recently more often narrowing my search results to the last week or month using the advanced search filtering in Google results for this very reason and so I would hope this does in fact return improved results.
In the Google Freshness announcement, Amit Singhal, Google fellow said:
Amit Singhal - Google Fellow
Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.
The post goes on to explain that the new Google Freshness algorithm update leverages the power of the 2010 release of Google Caffeine in discovering and serving new content quickly.
What this means is that we’re likely to see recently published articles and blog posts jump to the top of search result pages for temporal keywords such as recent events and trending topics, overtaking old and out of date content that really is no long relevant. Sites with recent reviews will score well – great news for restaurants/bars/cafes and E-commerce websites who are already engaging with their Customers and receiving regular reviews.
Why the change?
Is this Google trying to hit back at twitter?
Google have been without the twitter firehose since July and without it they can’t display tweets in SERPs quickly enough to keep the content fresh. What they do have however is the ability to quickly crawl popular blogging platforms that ping with updates (E.g. WordPress) and microblogging platforms such as tumblr.
So what makes content fresh?
It’s unknown what factors Google will consider to determind freshness but we can use a little common sense to figure that one out:
Not Fresh
- Content that hasn’t been updated for a long period of time
- Republishing your old content is not fresh (Google is aware of its previous existence)
- Tweaking old content slightly is not fresh (Google can determine similarities in content)
Yueak, milk was a bad choice!
Fresh
- Content that is newly published and not seen anywhere else
- Content that is temporal in nature; Recently occurred, upcoming or regularly occurring.
- Content that is being actively shared on social platforms. There’s that Google Plus again…
Will knows what's fresh
Since Google began they have been striving to deliver relevant results to searchers and it makes sense that the most relevant results are those that are relatively up to date and not old pages. It’s important to not that this doesn’t impact all searches. Your standard searches for non-temporal terms are likely to be unaffected, but its well known that over 70% of searches are long-tail and even 20% of the billions of searches each day are completely unique. I would bet a lot of those are temporal and related to dates.
This is something we have been well aware of for some time (in addition to thin content, anchor text links and paid links) but history with algorithm updates has seen that these methods continue to be practiced until such time as they don’t work anymore. Again, Google place further reward on those who publish quality, unique content over those who sit on out of date content or scrape content from elsewhere.
Whether this update will improve results is another matter. Panda was a huge algorithm update that caused a lot of unwarranted disruption to legitimate sites. It would be nice to get a bit more information from Google at the moment as to how Webmasters can ensure they are playing along to this particular fiddle and will not unintentionally fall foul of requirements.
