Updated: April 16, 2012
Just over a month ago, Google announced an update to its Caffeine indexing system known as the “freshness update.” As you know, Caffeine was rolled out last year and changed the way the search engine crawls and indexes pages.
This latest update is known as the ‘freshness update’ because of its stated goal – rank newer content higher in search results.
The search giant says these changes should affect around 35% of searches, mainly in areas where the most recent content matters – current events, hot topics, celebrity gossip, product/movie reviews and breaking news are examples of where this principal would apply. See further explanation and a list of the winners & losers in this great post from TechCrunch.
Here are a few searches you can look at for an example – “Black Friday 2011,” “Penn State scandal” or “NBA lock-out”
One thing you will notice is how top results are time-stamped and annotated more visually than before. Some of these annotations are in days while others are notated in minutes or even seconds. From these ‘time-stamps,’ we can tell that date-specific content is being served now more than ever.
Considering this emphasis on placing newer content higher in search results, consider the following 7 strategies to ‘evergreen’ your content and increase your chances of a ‘freshness’ boost in search results.
1) Start and maintain a blog
It’s clear from this update that more timely content is better. Therefore, one of the best ways to accomplish this ‘timely’ requirement is to publish content on a variety of topics on a regular, even daily basis. A blog is one of the best ways to easily get this content online.
2) Generate ‘Link Bait’ pieces
Content pieces that are informative and entertaining sometimes bring in thousands of visitors, hundreds of social media impressions and dozens of links each day. When these types of pieces are published on your blog, you will certainly see higher rankings. Seeing the popularity and relevancy for so many people will be a strong signal to Google.
3) Use Time Stamps to your advantage
Take a look at the top results in our sample searches and you’ll notice that each one has a time stamp. Each ‘freshness’ result has a clear publication date pulled by Google from the piece. Time stamping is easy to do and automatic on many blog platforms like WordPress. Google recommends the YYYY-MM-DD format (…2011-12-12).
4) Maximize Your Use of Social Media
Make sure you’re using social media tools to ‘push out’ new content as well as ‘pull in’ traffic and social signals to that same content. Nothing says ‘fresh’ like a Tweet, Facebook comment or a +1 on Google’s new social network. Also, you can tap into your social networks to help write more content for you. If that isn’t possible, getting your friends to simply promote your content or leave comments will dramatically boost your ‘freshness quotient’ with Google.
5) Dynamically Update XML Sitemaps
By default, XML sitemaps include time stamps for each crawled URL within the sitemap. Making sure these time stamps are updated regularly when new content is posted is now a pretty big deal. Blogging platforms like WordPress do this automatically but for your regular site content, it’s recommended you install a standalone XML sitemap generator that will automatically update your pages when you do.
6) Publish more Press Releases
Press releases scream ‘fresh’ and timely. In this new era of freshness though, press releases just may be the best and fastest way to feed the search engine a steady stream of the type of content they’re displaying high in search results. However, a press release will only remain fresh for a couple days up to a week so think about ways you can ‘update’ a prior press release with new, more detailed information when possible.
7) Get into Google News
Although it’s extremely difficult for a lone blogger to get into Google News, doing so can have a tremendous influence in how/if your content will find its way to the top of these ‘freshness’ results.
After reading about Google’s new fascination with freshness, you may be thinking that you can simply make changes to a previously published piece of content. According to Google’s statements though, one of the more important factors affecting which content they serve is when they first crawled a page. Making changes to your content in the hope of getting a ‘freshness boost’ will not work.
Therefore, be sure your content is correct the first time!!
One observation about these changes that we and others like our friends at Search Engine News have noticed – freshness doesn’t always equate to ‘most relevant’ in terms of returned search results. Down the road, this distinction may cause problems for Google…we’ll see of course.
Related Posts
Google “Caffeine” Goes Completely Live
Press Release Optimization – Why Your Press Release May Not Be Ranking