Digital Organics: Web Design Sunshine Coast - 1/102 Howard Street, Nambour, QLD 4560 T 617 5476 3800, SEO Sunshine Coast

Google's Freshness Score - How fresh is your content?

Internet marketers had a pretty good idea how the Google algorithm worked before Panda came

around. It was easy — target a few keywords, write content geared towards those keywords and

build backlinks. Create, maintain, repeat. Though this process was giving internet marketers what

they wanted, it wasn’t giving Google what it wanted. This wasn’t good for Google’s business, so

they changed everything. Partly because of the popularity of social media websites, Google’s

algorithm changes in a big way. We’re starting to see this with more frequent algorithm updates.

The most recent one is called the ―Freshness‖ update.

This one is a bit different than both the Mayday and Panda updates before. It doesn’t specifically

target a type of websites (Panda is still handling that). Instead, it was designed to make the

searcher’s life easier. For the Mayday and Panda updates, it was all about taking out the trash –

making sure when people searched for something, they didn’t get useless filler content. And now

that they have that handled (for the most part), it’s time to move on to making the search process

more fluid.

That’s exactly what the Freshness update has done. Google Freshness is all about making sure

search results are, well… fresh!

Google has designed a metric called ―query deserves freshness.‖ This metric is used to determine

whether or not a search query needs frequently updated news. So if you search for news on

"Occupy wall Street", that’s obviously a query that deserves freshness.

But if you search for ―cutting discs,‖ that’s not a query that deserves freshness. So the ―Occupy

wall Street‖ query is affected by the Freshness update, whereas the ―cutting discs‖ query isn’t.

What does this mean for SEO?

If you’re not in a niche or market that ―deserves freshness,‖ your SEO strategy will remain largely

unaffected by this most recent update. However, if you are in a market that ―deserves freshness,‖

you’ll have to start doing a few things different.

A few examples of niches that deserve freshness may include, Political News, Celebrity News,

Sports, TV Show Websites and anything that has to do with recent events ?r hot topics, regularly

recurring events, and frequent product/service updates.

As a rule of thumb, if your niche ―in the news‖ or is rapidly changing, it probably deserves

freshness. So what do you do if you’re in one of these niches? Easy – provide fresh content!

If you’re in the ―celebrity news‖ niche, whenever something important happens, be one of the first

people to write about it. If you’re writing reviews on products, whenever a new model launches,

be one of the first people to write about it!

Digital Organics: Web Design Sunshine Coast - 1/102 Howard Street, Nambour, QLD 4560 T 617 5476 3800, SEO Sunshine Coast

If you are not producing updated content to match with the news in your niche, you’ll fall behind

on the rankings.

The Good News

The goal of a search engine is to return the most relevant consequences to users. For your part,

this requires an honest assessment of your own content. What part of your site would benefit

most from freshness?

If you keep updating your content, your website will rank on the top of page 1 – even if you don’t

necessarily have that much "SEO authority!"

This is because Google’s new algorithm wants to display content as quickly as possible. It doesn’t

necessarily matter where that content comes from, so if you can be one of the first people to

publish news, you’ll likely rank very well on Google.

If you’re in a market that is affected, don’t panic! Instead, focus on providing frequently updated

content to your readers. This way, you’ll have a better user experience on your website AND you’ll

have a great chance of ranking on page 1.