Fresher Ranks Better: Google Freshness Update

Google Freshness: Rewarding Recency 

Google’s getting fresher than ever with recent announcements of an algorithmic change set to affect around 35% of all search results.

It’s been dubbed ‘Google Fresh’ or ‘Google Freshness’ by SEO’s, and is based upon the idea that recency, in many cases, equates to relevance.

The Lead up to Google Fresh

Last year’s ‘Caffeine’ update saw Google upgrade it’s infrastructure to be able to index massive amounts of content and process search results faster than ever before.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out the ‘Panda‘ update, affecting around 12% of searches. Panda aimed to improve search result quality by penalizing low quality sites and ‘content farms’ – (those sites essentially composed of scraped and duplicated content).

These updates have paved the way for the latest significant evolutionary step in Google’s development: Google Fresh.

What Does Google Fresh Mean for Search Users?

From the Google Blog:

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

Question is – what kind of content is going to be affected by the changes?

1-Recent Events or Hot Topics. News items, Sports events and items which relate to current ‘happenings’. Such searched will now favor the ‘up to the minute’ over yesterdays (or last wekk or last year’s) news.

2-Regularly Recurring Events. Sports events such as the Olympic Games, political elections, even Google Algorithmic updates fall into this category. Some searches will be looking for historical data, but those which don’t specify date will now return the freshest information available.

3-Frequent Updates. Other topics which cover frequently updating information but don’t fit in the above categories. This includes technology, science, and any other field which isn’t breaking news but is constantly changing – again, the most recent content will be returned in the search unless your search query specifies a preference for older information.

What does Google Fresh mean for Bloggers?

If you’re blogging about technology, sports, celebrities or news – it should be fairly clear. More than ever before, recently published content will be seen as more relevant and therefore be more likely to rank higher.

But the impact of fresh is not limited to these topics. Many blogs (including this one, to some extent) cover ‘developing’ topics.

For example, Social Media Marketing Strategy is a fast moving, and ever changing field, and posts on this topic from six months ago will tend to have far less relevance than a post published yesterday. Content marketing is slower to evolve, but a post from 2005 is going to be far less helpful than a post from 2011.

So consider carefully which subjects you want to tackle with ‘evergreen’ or ‘timeless’ posts. Again looking at examples from this blog – Core Marketing Principles such as Knowing your Target Market will be worth my time and effort to rank for since the core lessons in this area will be applicable even as technology and times change.

We can see that Google is advancing in its ability to recognise which content delivers the answers users need. Increasingly the foundation of how to get ranked in the search engines is content which is:

Consistently high quality, unique and relevant

Further Freshness Resources

This post together is an introduction to the Google Freshness development. If you want to learn about it in more depth, the following resources will help:

The Official Google Blog‘s Fresher, More Recent Search Results post

SEO Blogger Justin Briggs‘ post on Methods for Evaluating Freshness

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz‘s short Freshness discussion video with Mike King of iPullRank

Search Engine Land‘s coverage of the Freshness Impact and it’s inherent challenges

Before you head off and check those out, spread the word by sharing this post with your networks (thanks!), and share your thoughts on Google Freshness and it’s implications for search and ranking with a comment below.

Image adapted from Chill and Refreshing by Suraj Shajahan

Fresher Ranks Better: Google Freshness Update © 2011 Blogger’s Alchemy