Google Fresh Algorithm Update Makes Content Updating Important Now More Than Ever

This year, Google rocked the SEO world with its Panda Update, which brought local based search to the forefront amongst other important updates.  Now Google has announced that its latest algorithm update called “Fresh” will make updating websites important for top rankings.

The reason behind the fresh algorithm update is to provide the most recent webpage for a topic.  No longer will people search for an annual event and get results from 2009, but instead will get information on the latest event.  Google is always trying to bring back better results with every search query, and no longer returning old information in the top results is a great step to a better search engine.

On the blog, Amit Singhal States:

“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.”

At the end of the article, he provides an update that reads:

“Update 11/7/11: To clarify, when we say this algorithm impacted 35% of searches, we mean at least one result on the page was affected, as opposed to when we’ve said noticeably impacted in the past, which means changes that are significant enough that an average user would notice. Using that same scale, this change noticeably impacts 6 – 10% of searches, depending on the language and domain you’re searching on.”

What Does This Mean to the Webmasters?

Simply put, this update means that websites must keep their content fresh in order to stay at the top.  No longer should ancient, well search engine optimized articles stay at the top and provide outdated information.  There are many ways to keep your website generating updated content, and therefore stay on top of the “Fresh” update.

• Create a Blog – Blog about specific news in your industry.   These keyword rich articles are great for keeping you on top.
• Create a Forum – A forum is a great discussion board where you can help your clients/users with various problems or questions in your industry.
• Write Press Releases – Write press releases and send them out to various news sources.  If your press releases are well written, other people will publish your content for you.
• Just Do What Google Wants – Most importantly, just give Google what they want.  Update your pages.  Change your look at least once a year.   Make sure your various promotions are always displayed.  Change your content to match the trends.  Hopefully you are already doing this, and have nothing to worry about.

From a webmaster’s point of view, this algorithm update is great.   Besides the fact that websites should always be updated to include the business’ latest information and the latest technology so as not to fall in the “old website” pile, now SEO can be added to the list.  From a business point of view, this new algorithm update will get expensive!  Blog/Press Release writing takes time, and time is money!  Not to mention that SEO companies will now have something else to charge you for because there is now another factor to look out for.

Most importantly, for the end user, finding new information just got easier, and that is really what searching is all about.