Recently, Google announced that they were updating portions of the “Caffeine” update to help give users more recent, timely, and fresh search results. Having fresh, quality content is more important than ever in the current landscape, and here is a summary of how the update may affect your rankings and some actionable steps for taking advantage of these changes.
Google said that their new fresh update…
• Affects ~35% of search queries
• Prioritizes “recent” and “timely” results
• Is based off the “Caffeine” update.
Now, its important to remember that queries doesn’t equal keywords. When Google says 35% of all queries, that means 35% of searches, not unique keywords. For example, there could be only 10 keywords that get the overwhelming majority of searches, thus impacting 35% of all searches through the update.
SEOs are seeing the following trends from the “Freshness” update.
• Much more subtle than the Panda update was in terms of impact on rankings
• Seems to help lots of “date-specific” or time-stamped content, not just hyper-new content
• Appears to show some new annotations/results types in branded queries
A useful tip for getting the benefits of these date-specific rankings is to utilize RSS feeds for your website content. If you have any content on your website which is regularly updated, use an RSS feed to time-stamp all your content and allow the search engines to get hold of this data.
And some takeaways…
• Watch your important (re: conversion prone) search engine result pages for signs of fresh, new, or time-stamped content.
• If you are not investing in a blog, news, articles and “content marketing”, you need to get on top of this ASAP. The leaders in each industry are already strongly rooted in content marketing, and you are falling behind if you are not taking advantage of these trends in search.
• Watch whether/how Google grabs time-stamped content. Currently, there is no Schema or RDFa for time-stamps, but you can utilize the time-stamp in HTML5.
For more information about how to leverage content marketing and take advantage of Google’s propensity for "Freshness”, contact the SEO team at Verndale.