What Google's New "Freshness Update" Means to You! - On November 3rd, 2011 Google announced the introduction of a new update to their web indexing system. This most recent update, affecting roughly 35% of searches, has become known as the Freshness Update due to its stated goal of delivering fresher, more recent search results.
In short, the goal of the update was to rank NEWER content HIGHER in the search results for most queries.
What you'll notice is how the top-served content results are time stamped and annotated more visually than previously. Some results show these annotations in days, while others are in hours and even minutes (8 minutes ago). The takeaway here is that date-specific content is being served now more than ever before.
Currently, a vast majority of this real-time "fresh" content is tied to the following content areas: breaking news, hot topics (tech, gadgets, etc.), current events, celebrity gossip, video media, sports updates, and customer/product reviews.
Here are 5 strategies we recommend you implement to evergreen your content and increase your chances of a freshness boost for your website:
1. Get a Blog: Google has made it clear that the more timely your content is the better. Publishing regular content on a variety of topics, daily, is the best way to accomplish this "timely" requirement. There is no better mechanism available to do this than through a blog. If you don't have a blog, get one, now!
2. Use Link Bait: Well researched, informative, and entertaining pieces of content can and do bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media signals, and dozens of links, everyday. These types of content pieces, when published on a blog, result in higher rankings and the type of viral impact that Google's new freshness update will eat up!
3. Understand & Leverage Time-Stamps: Each "freshness" result shows a clear publication date that is pulled by Google directly from the article's content. Time stamping content is a no-brainer and is relatively easy to do in most blogging software suites. Google recommends you use the following dating format: YYYY-MM-DD, or 2012-10-03.
4. Embrace Social Media: Make sure you are using social media both to "push out" your own blog content and to "pull-in" traffic and social signals to that same content. Tap your social audience to write up content, promote your current content, or just leave comments. All of these will result in increased Google crawls which up your freshness quotient.
5. Publish more Press Releases: In a post-Google "freshness" world, press releases just may be the BEST and FASTEST way to feed the engine a steady stream of the type of frequent content they now appear to be rewarding. A press release however is probably only going to be "fresh" for a couple of days, a week at tops. So consider publishing NEW releases as updates of previous ones that provide more detailed information where possible. This will continually push forward your goal to generate "fresh" content that Google can serve on your behalf.
Google has stated that one of the more important "freshness factors" that affect which content they serve is WHEN they first crawled the page. Meaning, you can't just publish a piece of content, then make changes to that content later, in the hopes you get a freshness boost. In other words, get your content right the first time.
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