Taking Advantage of “Freshness”

Back on November 3rd, Google rolled out one of its more important algorithm changes of the year with the “Freshness Update.” The algorithm aimed to provide fresher content for 3 kinds of content.

3 Types of Content Affected by “Freshness:”

• Recent events or hot topics (like the “NBA lockout”)
• Regularly recurring events (like the “Presidential election”)
• Frequent updates (“like the best hdtvs”)

Each of these kinds of queries demands the most recent content for a particular topic in their own unique way. If you are searching for the most recent information about the lockout, you may want to see articles that are only a minute or two old. For regularly occurring events, you want to make sure you are seeing the information for this coming presidential election, not from the previous one. And for things like product reviews and buyer’s advice, you want what people are thinking right now about a certain product, not a year or two ago where the model might have gotten an upgrade. Essentially, this update tries to understand the intent of the searcher and provide more relevant results based on our own propensity for fresh, timely content.

Here are some aspects of your website that you should think about if you want to make sure you’re taking advantage of the changes provided by the freshness update.

1. The date of creation or attribution of the document.
2. The date of recent updates or changes to a document.
3. The use of new programmatic languages like html5/css3.
4. The use of search schema and micro-data involving dates.
5. The previous positions on search result pages and movements.
6. The historical traffic levels, clickthrough rates, and their changes.
7. The trend in specific or branded queries and changes in clickthrough rates.
8. New user behavior and trend in received feedback.
9. The trend in user generated bookmarks and social citations.
10. Document topics cross-referenced with trending data.
11. The link development trends and link accumulation velocity.

For more information about how to leverage content marketing and take advantage of Google’s propensity for "Freshness,” contact the SEO team at Verndale.