New Google Search Algorithm Targets Fresh Content

Posted by Sol Harris in Articles, Latest News      No comments

Nov 5 2011

If you ever needed a reason to update your website regularly, here it is: The new Google Search algorithm gives websites with the freshest content a higher search result score.

We’ve been saying this to our clients all along “post regular updates on your website to get better search ranking”.

Of course, just having an updated site is not the be all and end all of good Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking, but with Google notching up a nod to sites that are fresh, it’s not hard to see that you can improve your ranking by keeping your site up to date.

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

Those are the words of Amit Singhal, the author of the recent post on the official Google blog.  He goes on to say;

We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

So, the new algorithm will affect 35% of all Google searches – that’s over one third, and that is massive.  There is no doubting that by having an up to date website, you will reap the rewards when someone is Googling your keywords.

So what can you do ?  As a webdesign and emarketing company, we advise our clients to write at least one relevant and interesting article, once a week.  More if you can manage it.  But we realise that your core business may not be in writing great articles on your website!

If you can’t do it yourself, you can always ask a staff member to do it for you.

An alternative approach is to think of the content of your site. Could you update your page content? Or perhaps add that new testimonial your customer wrote for you? What about asking a business colleague to write a review of your service or an article as a guest writer?

Failing any of that, you could approach someone to write articles for you.

The bottom line is, a fresh website is more likely to get better results – and not just from Google – your customers and website visitors will appreciate up to date information too!

If you’d like any advice on the best approach to take, just get in touch.