Yesterday, Google announced that they released a new update that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and can better determine when to give you more up-to-date relevant results. What does that mean for you as a search marketer? Rand, with special guest Mike King (@iPullRank) dive into what this mean for you and your clients. Let us know your thoughts on this most recent update in the comments below!
p.s. from Rand: I'd also recommend reading this excellent post from Justin Briggs on Methods Google May Use to Evaluate Freshness.
Video Transcription
Rand: Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I am joined by none other than Mike King. Mike, so great to have you.
Mike: What's going on, Rand? Thanks for having me.
Rand: Mike is out of Publicis in New York. He spoke recently at the Search Love Conference and spoke here at the Seattle Interactive Conference.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: Getting big on the scene. And Mike, we've got some supposedly big changes from Google coming out today.
Mike: We had the Google Freshness update today.
Rand: So Google announced it, right? So Amit Singhal, head of Search Quality at Google, writes on the blog and he says a few things, and we've got some questions about this. He says, "Google's new Freshness Update affects 35 percent of queries. It prioritizes recent and timely results, and it's based off their Caffeine infrastructure."
Mike: So far what we're seeing is it's 35 percent of queries, but I think people are expecting that to mean 35 percent of keywords. That's not what's happening. So we're seeing it on a lot of head terms. For example, here's a SERP that we saw for football. What we're seeing is really recent posts being annotated to the SERPs, so they're having 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, 18 minutes ago.
We're also seeing that for basketball, Microsoft Courier, Wall Street, and Top Chef Texas. You can google those right now and see these in the SERPs.
Rand: When they say affects 35 percent of search results, and we're seeing, like, boy, it feels a lot more subtle than Panda. A lot of SEOs are like, "Boy, 35 percent of queries. You said Panda only affected 11 or 12 percent." Something feels disconnected. Talk about the difference between affecting keywords versus affecting query volume.
Mike: Right. When they're saying 35 percent of queries, these are words that people are actually searching for. It's not necessarily just every keyword in the keyword universe.
Rand: Gotcha.
Mike: So it could be a much smaller set of keywords than we're talking about here.
Rand: If 10 percent of people in the world google "Kim Kardashian wedding," tragically - they really shouldn't, but they do - then that could be a huge part of what they're saying is affected here.
Mike: Absolutely. That's what we're seeing, a lot of celebrity keywords that are being affected. But that kind of makes sense because those are inherently QDF keywords.
Rand: Right. Query deserves freshness. One of the things that we noticed is it seems to help lots of date-specific content, not just hyper- new, meaning some of these results are 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, but we're also seeing a lot more stuff that's . . .
Mike: It's like two days ago or seven days ago, but it's all date-specific, like you're saying.
Rand: Yeah. Then there are some of these new annotation types of results. So this, fundamentally, looks different to us. It's not site links.
Mike: Absolutely. They're direct links to individual articles rather than site links.
Rand: And we think these are RSS-based. Is that right?
Mike: Absolutely. So we did a few, like, poking around a few different feeds and things, and we saw that they did match up almost directly with the RSS feeds.
Rand: So if you're trying to illustrate specific content in your fresh links, which Google is now providing you an opportunity to do, RSS seems to make a ton of sense.
Mike: Definitely. For example, they have the last mod . . . what's the word?
Rand: Oh, the last modified date? You mean the stamp?
Mike: Right, exactly. So that time stamp seems to be something that's affecting that. So keep those up-to-date, and your XML sitemaps could definitely help with this.
Rand: Right. We were talking about the Top Chef Texas query. And when you look at the Top Chef Texas page today, it's basically Bravo TV, and then every result in there is from the last 12 hours.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: Meaning, Mike, you and I write a great blog post about Top Chef Texas last week, and it's ranking well. Today, forget about it.
Mike: Yeah, you really have to stay on top of it. So if you're writing content about Top Chef Texas, make sure that you continue to have content on it. That's like a TV show that happens regularly. If you're going to do that, you need to write about every episode to stay on top of it.
Rand: Yeah. And this is kind of a big change for Google.
Mike: Definitely.
Rand: So that could be part of that 35 percent that it's affecting.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: I'm going to make you come this way with me. We've got some takeaways for marketers here. One of the ones, tell me about this, "Watching Your Important SERPs for Signs." How do I check this? How do I check whether I'm going to be affected, and what search results should I be watching? If we're talking about most important SERPs, we've got to thinking about things that drive the most conversions, the thing that drives the most traffic, and the thing that drives the most engagement. And then for fresh and time saved content, basically if you're seeing . . .
Mike: Blog posts.
Rand: Yeah. If you're seeing the eight hours ago, you're seeing the days, you've got to do that. I mean, you and I are both huge believers in this, right?
Mike: Absolutely. Content marketing, if you're not doing it, like it's says, you're crazy.
Rand: You crazy. I wrote that there.
Mike: He did. He did.
Rand: And then finally, we've got to watch whether and how Google is grabbing this time stamped content. We have some questions about the RSS feeds are being pulled in here. It doesn't always seem to be just the most recent items.
Mike: It doesn't seem to be like a one-to-one thing, so it's hard to say. Maybe they're looking at shared or how much is being pushed on social.
Rand: Google+.
Mike: Exactly, Google+, how many people are pressing that magic +1 button. So it's hard to say, but I would venture to guess that they're thinking about social, because if it's the most relevant, it makes more sense that it's shared the most.
Rand: And if it's coming from RSS, they've got have all that data about who's clicking on those RSS feeds.
Mike: Absolutely. Like Will Reynolds was saying, they own FeedBurner, so they have all this data. Are people reading this stuff?
Rand: Sure.
Mike: So this may be that final application of it.
Rand: Fascinating. All right. So supposedly there's a huge change, but we're not feeling it nearly as dramatically as Panda.
Mike: Not at all.
Rand: So we'll see how this rolls out. I certainly look forward to comments and feedback from you guys. Mike, thank you very much for joining me. Appreciate it.
Mike: Thank you for having me.
Rand: Cheers, gang.
Speaking of freshness, what an incredibly fresh WBF! Google just made this announcement and here you are with a great post/video about it. Nice work, Rand and Michael.
Good analysis about the difference between 35% of queries and 35% of keywords - that makes a big difference. I'm eager to see how this updated notion of freshness translates to traffic and competitive gains in the SERPs.
What does WBF means? World Boxing Federation :-) I am German - I don't get this.
WBF means Whiteboard Friday. :]
Thanks - Stupid me :-)
It's actually World Bridge Fundation :)
BTW: if you view the video with headphones and revers Left with Right (or turn the headphnes 180) and since the audio is actually stereo you can hear Rand on the left side and King on the right side and that is really funny :)
You should try this out !
I would appreciate if the handwriting on the withboard is bigger. It is difficult to read.
All the "freshness" in the world isn't gonna help you if your business model sucks.
But... but... that's NOT FAIR!
I have an inside contact at Google! I can do anything I want! I rule the interwebz!
<bromance>
I could listen to Mike and Rand talk about #SEO all day. Smooth Mike voice and fiery Rand passion... mmm.
</bromance>
But seriously, thanks for this Whiteboard Friday! Some good info about the latest update which seems to heavily favor Newsy content. Adds a new level to keyword research.
+1 for the bromance tag!
Thanks for the WBF regarding Google's Freshness update!
As a leaner ...I have certain doubts...and I hope mozbuddies would help me to clear my doubts!
Q.No. 1)
As per the conversation between Rand and Mike, they said that the freshness update will effect 35% of the Search Queries, so does that mean "Whole Search Queries constituting 35% of the Google search query database will get affected or just 35% of queries from every type of searche from a niche category e.g. Product searches, Information Searches, question and Answer type of searches etc. will get affected ?"
Q. 2)
If a website has the Scientific data published 2 or 3 years ago..and it has good reputation,e.g. NASA but tomorrow a website(may be any News site like Fox News having less reputation compared to scientific website) publishes little bit relevant content/information regarding the main scientific topic..so will google show the News site in top position in SERP ?
Please answer.. I am Highly trapped in these Doubts!!!
Thanks In advance for the answers, and Thanks a lot for WBF!!!
Ans 1. It is about 35% of overall search (an approximation).
Ans 2. It depends on the authority of website. For instance, if NASA launched a satellite who do you think knows better about it, NASA or Fox News? Off course, NASA knows better details but Fox News might be the one who post it first on the web. But once the NASA post a press release about it nobody will be given more authority then that. In the longrun authority would win the race.
Thanks for the reply, hence ultimately even if the freshness update gives importance to the fresh contents, in the long run the authority value counts!! Thanks a lot ! :)
Will this real time search be an open gateway to 'freashness' spam ? or only the real heavy weight authorities will be listed in the top ? Is this connected with the past changes regarding authoritie writers ?
My thoughts exactly. I mean if we're going to have folks digging up news stories and passing random comment about them with no relevance to their products/services just to secure a spot in the serps under a high-traffic topic, surely it opens the floodgates for manipulation?
Knowing Google they would have already considered this - I'm just surprised there isn't more information about how they are going to preserve quality in this regard.
This is a big update... I feel like we are on the cusp of another big announcement from Google
Google is getting closer and closer to realtime search.
Great WBF - nice to see you "live" Mike!
Petra, a couple years ago I noticed that Google would index my Craigslist ads within 15 mintues. They have been doing near realtime search, but I think they are being selective about the websites.
I can alreday imagin the army of "auto updating bots" that are going to automaticlly change the time stamp on articles.
hmmm...don't like to be the nay sayer but...
I suspect this is going to "feel" a whole lot more like a great big 35% smack in the face for the small business site owner who is just doing their best to make good information about their company available online :(
Not everyone wants or NEEDS to be a blogger or a news hub to give their customers a great online experience.
Somehow the much championed "personalization" is starting to feel like the worst kind of shoving square pegs into round holes!
I'm just guessing but won't most small business owners not be appearing on the kinds of SERPs where this is in effect? I'm thinking sports, weather, news, celebrities etc. Personally as an ecom selling a relatively static set of products I'm doubting whether this is going to affect me at all.
What about all the sports memorabilia and celebrity fashion retailers though? Both fairly big ecommerce markets.
Being UK based, I decided to try this for the search "football", aside from obviously providing a different set of results (since football over here is "soccer" in the USA), one thing I did notice which is quite frustrating is the lack of relevance in the results to my specific location - Scotland.
As Scotland has it's own relatively high profile Premier League on a European scale (digs at the quality aside), it's not a stretch to expect some of the "site link style" results to be relevant to this.
However, the focus is entirely on English Premier League news. Which suggests that perhaps relevance (to localised intent) is being cast aside somewhat in favour of recency?
Maybe too early to tell and hardly a scientific test by any means, but figured its a point worth raising.
Good point. And as Google pushes both - what will win? Is it fresh or is it local? And I'm not talking about food.
Great WBF!
Glad you guys discussed the 12% for Panda 1.0 vs. the 35% for this update. That 3X difference scared me yesterday. I think the other tough thing is that the % of queries changed doesn't indicate how much each query changed. A "change" could mean that the #9 and #10 spot flipped, or one new, recent listing got added. Overall, those numbers carry very little informaiton.
Great point Dr. Pete, I feel the same way - for all we know those "changes" could be as minor as you stated.
Also, I've got a very interesting question for you: What will take priority in the future, freshness or quality? It seems as though they're trying to go to real time search, meaning what ever is posted most recently is the priority, but what if the post written 3 weeks ago is higher quality than a post 2 hours ago on the same subject? How do you justify ranking the second one over the first because of this "freshness" idea?
I was wondering how is it going to be different from initial versions of Google algorithms. Because Google have already collaborated with Twitter to provide the most relavant and updated content to users!
I have gone through some other articles oo that is saying it is a big change. Here is an another informative article on this update https://bit.ly/uxDHz5
I noticed this before it was official with two of my blogs, having got lazy and searched for the term "seo andy" (my site being seoandy.com) yes it gave the top link as the main link but it also listed two or 3 stories below when normally that search would result in other results being there.
Also something I've noticed over the past few weeks is that Google has made it a lot easier to get sitelinks it maybe a silent change they've made but I am noticing a LOT more people with them on sites that well don't really need or deserve them?
Another apparent poke in the eye of the small business owner. "so, guys. Remember that blog you didn't even want in the first place, but Google's practices essentially forced you to include? Yeah, now you're gonna have to update it daily". Oh, and let's add an unsightly Google+ button to your stylish site, just to be safe.
I feel your pain!
Guest posters would help out in return for a link back or a free product. Daily is probably unnecessary for most niches, but yeah three or so times per week will help.
I'm just hoping the flip side will be that spammers and sponsored content writers who just write a blog post every few months will be dissuaded from creating tons of very thin sites.
This has been a great WBF for us.
Only yesterday we did a Wordpress (Hosted by Wordpress) blog posting with a 'Read full article' link to the main story on our website. We employed Google’s ‘Customise + Snippet’ feature and set the HTML tag to Article <html itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Article">, added a +1 button, added the story to our sitemap.xml file set the last modified date for yesterday, used Google Fetch and indexed, Bing’d in Central you name we did it.
We then checked on Google later that day and the story was listed first for a brand specific query related to the story, it also stated [Google] that the story was published 2 hours ago. Delighted to see this but the interesting point here is that it was the blog version of the story that was served up not the main page with all the Googleisation worked carried out on it.
So to emphasise what was being discussed in this week's WBF, the Wordpress blog TRUMPED! the primary content page – was this due to RSS Feed on the blog.
I was in the throes of moving all stories over to the main website, however I think sticking to a 80/20 split of the content i.e. 20% content on the blog and 80% on the main content page (with all the call-to-actions etc.) would probably be the best approach to adopt.
Yes agreed, keep your content coming and refreshed consistently to reap the benefits of these changes in Google search
For reference here is the blog post link and a link to the main story.
https://instantatlas.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/caci-uk-giving-large-retailers-detailed-insight-to-help-them-find-the-right-location-and-promote-their-stores-effectively/
https://www.instantatlas.com/CACI_UK_Story.xhtml
Well done on a great WBF Rand & Mike!!
I think a lot of people underestimate the value of WordPress; it's an absolute SEO goldmine. I think that once the post gets older your homepage will start to rank higher than it though.
Most recent != most relevant. As a searcher, I wouldn't like this. I would like something simulatneously recent AND relevant, but I would certainly prefer something a little older if it was a better source.
agree, from the searchers point of view, most recent isn't always the best result. freshness has always been a factor in organic rankings, now it's getting more attention and possible a bigger chunck of the Algo!
Agreed, but don't forget that this does not apply to ALL keywords. Google claims that with this update they are getting super smart about what kind of searches deserve fresh results, and what kinds don't. I suspect that for the types of queries where most recent isn't relevant, Google won't serve fresh results. And I suspect they will require some authority for some of the results to queries that are fresh. But we'll just have to wait and see how things end up turning out...
@Joshua, yes!! 100% agree... sports scores and celeb gossip -> freshness counts. Looking for a local plumber or landscaper... not so much!
I think for top level generic terms we may not see much of a shift, yet with lower range "news" terms I can see a real shake up. I think any Google owned property or partner property is 100% worth been all over as said in the video the feed burned link up is one to watch.
But overall great WBF =)
ALERT...!!! "Update Your Content"
This message indirectly send to all online marketers to notify them if your content is not up to date then it can affect your current ranking. Thanks for awesome post. As per my analysis it will affect bloggers. Those old post may not update so ranking goes down after indexed. Google already put monster on copy-cat bloggers by Panda update.
PROBLEM:
This update will affect bloggers those have unique content. So in SERP's ranking goes down if any search related to to that post then Google will give recent & updated post earlier then older one(which contain unique content).
GOOD:
It is good news for News related sites. Those site need to update regularly, their ranking up rather than informative content older sites.
Does that mean we get now a lot of articles in the serps that cover only part of a specific issue in order get more articles out. They will split an article in 12 section and will post it within a longer tim period instead immediately. That sucks!
And will news makers wait with their articles in order to rank higher because they post it later? That sucks too!
I don't think so, remember this is just one part of the whole big algorithm that ranks content. Yes, freshness of the content will matter more now (for ceratain search attempts only) but the quality of the content and all the other ranking factors do matter as well.
Of course it matters but news writers who know about SEO will prefer to wait. At least they should if they are not eager to constantley update their news article. Why should they post right away when it gives them a bonus to wait a day or so.
Nobody will wait, keep in mind that google tracks social interaction, the g+, tweet, facebook share etc will be a major factor in the rankings. Google will track which article is good enough to be listed on the first page by analysing the bounce rate, time on site, engagement and now freshness.
I am wondering if alot of socail markers (likes, G+) in a short time period will boost a rank..
I doubt it any real news publication would delay publication for SEO purposes.
The whole idea is to be first with the news.
To do otherwise puts their reputation at risk.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Hi Rand and Mike, great and fresh WBF today.
As Jonathos said in his comment, good your remark about Search Queries and Keywords... great difference. And a difference that finally give me a justification to the Impression Data in the "Search Queries" page of Google Webmaster Tools.
Just one note about how Google could decide how fresh pages rank: social signals are maybe the main factor, but I would not exclude also the links metric on domain level, as - usually - a just published page does not own instantly enough link power to justify being ranking in the first positions. A third factor could be - quite obviously - the freshness itself, but I would consider it a minor factor if not substained by the first two. So, social popularity and overall domain authority IMO are the things to take into account if you are a news site or mostly based on news.
Ciao
That was a very informative video. Thanks or sharing it. I applaud google for always having something new in their website!
Hi,
What does mean of 35%, google shows only 10 results in a page does it mean 3 to 4 fresh results.
Where google will put the result - in top 5, in top 10 or what?
If the whole 35% of query result then, there is no chance for old site in the first page..
Great WBF!
So how do you think Google determines whether a QDF? The obivous categories are sports, major events, news etc. But do you think they will go as granlar as product launches(apple) or movie/dvd releases? It may be hard to determine in advance if they will take freshness into account for a query until nearer the time and until the search volume increases.
Sooooo is this the ultimate high five for content marketing? That's what it seems like to me.
It is indicating all the SEO's that RSS is important and updating content on regular basis is how much more important now.... Good Post..
On the one hand, I am happy about it for news. That was always aggrevating when search for something like 'US Open' in Aug 2010 brought up a 2009 article since that was more popular. This will fix the news element.
But I do think it's a very big deal, it pushes further down the organic search results. But interestingly enough, the 10 organic search results are still 10. So, when I searched for "daylight savings time" 3 recent articles came up along with the 10 organic, so the recent articles are not replacing organic results.
Will it in the future? If so, then we have some real work to do.
For me this is the real beginning of social search. The trigger for crawling this fresh content will be social in many cases. I see 2 scenarios:
Both scenarios include Social Media which happens to be the catalyst together with Google realtime search.
So I think for some 35% of queries we can stop asking ourselves whether Social is a ranking signal or not. It is. From now on.
Okay, obviously hindsight is 20/20 and since this article has been out for a little while it has been proven to be true. You made an assumption in this post that Google could be factoring in their Google Plus social influence and this has now obviously been proven that they are certainly going to be factoring that in. So good foresight and I think one take away from this post is that and as always, content is king. This is actually a bad saying. The bottom line and what this is saying is produce a good product, do the best that you can do, and people will notice that. White Hat gets shared! Black Hat does Not!!!
I am seeing this on my personal site but am not really sure of the implications for me specifically. On the one hand when I write a blog post I find it easily and more quickly in Google search results than before. The problem created for searchers is that some of my older, evergreen posts with very valuable comment threads are no longer showing well in search results. So searchers are only seeing more recent posts that do not have the breadth of content attached to them.
So it's been about 6 weeks since the update. Has anyone conected any more dots about the implications of the freshness update?
This update is ridiculous and unneeded. If people wanted freshness, they could just click the "past hour" or "past 24 hours" links in the left sidebar of the Google search results. This is what I have always done if I needed freshness in my search results. Now, with this update we lose "relevance" and are stuck with only freshness. I guess they need to put a "Relevent" button in the sidebar now?
Wouldn't it have been easier to create a campaign to educate users about the existing search tools instead of spending all this time and money creating another algorithm?
Looking forward to seeing the effect this has over the coming weeks. Good news for dynamic content sites. Very exciting and welcome update for those who concentrate first on content!
In my opinion, the recent changes that make Google pay more attention to fresh topics with fresh content needs a lot of improvements.
I have analyzed the changes my website has been affected by Google Freshness Update. I've been running a blog which covers cross-sectional stories related to seasons. The content is 100% UNIQUE. It's a blog with posts covering stories about fashion seasons: spring and summer, fall and winter. It's definitely not a news blog, not hooked on what's on in fashion. This means, it shouldn't be affected but apparently it was. My rankings dropped by 50%.
What's funny, I've analyzed pages that rank better after the upgrade. These are old post, out-of-date to be exact. I don't want my visitors to visit my old pages so I would always post links within the old content to the newer posts. But it doesn't help nowadays.
It looks like the rest 65% of searches was also somehow affected with changes. Why? Because now, in my opinion, every time a user searches for something that doesn't require the freshness factor, Google ranks old pages better.
If Google aims to improve user experience, then I urge them to fix the bug because a lot of valuable sites have been negatively affected.
Update times have had a substantial weight in the past, that's why SEO's love blogs. But most websites are not set up on a blog platform, so long standing credible websites could possibly have their pagerank dropped within days. I don't see company owners being very dilligent about article updates but the exact opposite. Now is the time to take advantage of the updates, get our sites up and let the uninformed drop. Great Post, we'll see how this plays out!
Very helpful in explaining the new algo tweak. I can't wait to see how this update interacts with a panda-fied site though.
Am I appreciating this Whiteboard Friday?
Absolutely.
Great video, info and guest!
How will this freshness update affect Bing and Yahoo!?
Side note: when I searched "Google freshness update" this video came up with a bar that read " 'NEW' 3 days ago - 6 min," which is something I've never seen before.
Thanks for the explanations. I take from it that although there are going to be many keyword terms affected in SERPs it sounds like there are also many that wont be affected. I tested as you mentioned broad terms like football and did see the annotated results. However other terms like lawsuit showed none. Do you think this will stay this way or should we be preparing and changing our workflows and systems ?
This WBF is clear and reinforces my personnal opinion that this update, will have any impact on Ecommerce queries first and the long tail eitheir
Very nice explained Google latest algorythm change. I totally supporting this " Freshness" update, because almost everything is changing, and almost on daily basis. This update will produce more quality in their search results.
Hi everyone!
I was analysing the effect on local Googles because, most of the times, we watch the future of our Googles (like Google.com.ar or Google.es) in Google.com.
This one, was a general update: both for you as for us (local searchers). We have found a lot of keywords with the freshness update on SERPs but, not all have it.
For example, you have the word "best notebook" in english. For this kind of keyword, you need the most recent results, right? You don't care about the "best notebook" in 2009, nor even 2010! For this kind of search, you need the MOST RECENT results, right? You need the Freshness update!
Well, for Google.com you have the most recent results mixed with regular results. So, for me, Google is starting to "learn" that these kind of keywords need fresh results. But, when you do the same on Google.com.ar or Google.es, things are VERY different.
An argentinian will search for "mejor notebook" in Google.com.ar, and a spanish will search for "mejor portatil" in Google.es. Here you will find results from this year, and... from 2006!!! (remember to remove "Web History" and to "Display tips and messages in spanish" too)
It's incredible the difference between Google.com and local searchers like Google.es and Google.com.ar in terms of search evolution.
Thanks you both for this Whiteboard Friday!
Fran.
Great explanation of the new change, I'm already seeing some keywords dropping fast due to freshness.
Great insight into what 35% of queries really means. I'm curious - did Mike do something really right to get all the exposure he's been getting lately? He seems to be the hottest topic in the SEO industry at the moment.
I promised to name my first born after Roger Mozbot.
Information vs. Products/Services
I think 35% of queries refers to queries seeking information, not queries searching products or services (at least that's what one would hope as the new 'freshness' factor does not make much sense for eCommerce queries with a few exceptions probably.
I have no idea what the ratio of info/entertainment related searches to commercially motivated searches is but I can only hope (for my personal search experience as well as for our webstie of course) that this update is aimed at that percentage only and 35% could sound about right..
Julian
Thanks SEOMOZ. Woke up this morning and client emailed saying his page rank had dropped overnight. Other forumns are sayin that page rank hasn' dropped as much for them. I will pass on your video but it looks like the content creators are the winners here. They've got even more work to do to keep sites at the top and generating traffic.
Well, my traffic went up quite alot - 50% since last Sunday.
BUT, if you consider last Sunday was the day before Halloween (always a slower time for me) 20-30% is probably more accurate.
I don't even think I'm in a niche where recent is hugely important?!
(weddings)
Thanks for the video.
Important to add that Google claims that 35% of queries are effected but one needs to realize that 20% of all searches are new and unique so that is why we don't see an immediate impact because we don't have any existing data on new searches. In other word looking at existing keywords is not a good metric. However what I would look is that correlation of organic growth and compare it to before and see how it impacts our organic growth. If it slows it down, I would find out by how many percent and then I would try to justify my SEO efforts there.
Interesting. Not really applicable to any of my projects but definitely woth passing on within the company.
Great White Board Friday guys, I like the Freshness of the Content!
The 35% of Queries clarification is certainly a key takeaway from this, it obviously equates to less than 35% of keywords, probably a lot less, like the popular topical kind of queries you mention such as Football and Celebrities.
I hope people don't start creating worthless content just for the sake of trying to rank highly in Fresh results, will be really interesting to study the quality of the content related to these fresh results over the coming days and weeks. Likely that Google will be constantly tweaking their Freshness Algorithm to ensure that quality results remain alongside freshness, I certainly hope so :-)
@Rüdiger Kladt I disagree with your second point. They must verify the authenticity before placing it to SERPs otherwise it would hurt Google's own authority.
@Rand Great WBF as always (specially the point "It will effect 35% queries not keywords"). To me this feature would create a massive effects on news based on events, schedules, etc. news that may not be very important after few hours or a day.
Google is trying to fill the gap what the elimination of "Realtime Search" has created for them, but it would be rather helpful for their users if they add this feature as an element not on general SERPs.
@Ssan - The early birds content, whish is puplished at first will get a better ranking than the seconds posts with copied contents.
Good news for news websites that make their money by delivering bad news! Seems like Google is left chasing the social web, a monster they can't control, and a monster that's getting harder and harder to spam.
finally an imazing news from google.
but i think here is a point. imagine that we are on the way of election and you post sth about the past up to now days base on what i understand if someone wants to know the news there is no place for my article about the history of election in somewhere
Am i wrong or right?
because if i search about the election news and updates are on top of result
They should think about this, too! There are lots of contents in this style! What about Wikipedia?!
Great WBF. Fresh content and engagement through social are becoming more and more important now, as has been mentioned Google seems to be pushing towards near real time search.
Great (and fast) job, guys!
I'm not sure how we can rank so well our latest posts. As Gianluca says, although social signals are going to be decisive, we can't forget the newness of links: probably, this point could be the lack of Google's update. So, this initiative must be sustained by a strong social sharing. Again, "Social" gets into action as a main actor.
And now, my question: With all those innovations in the presentation of search results, have you ever think about the time when Google will put in front of our eyes the queries that we (suppose) are going to do? Google is turning into our minds!!!
Are you afraid?
See you.
Great WBF guys!
Real time results have started to show their face ever since social search was introduced. QDF terms require recent information and this should be benefiting SEO's who use content strategies (I can't see why you wouldn't). Content has always been the currency for the majority of SEOs and as Google continues to want to deliver good results to it's users recency and revelancy will continue to be a major influence.....and so it should!
On an other note! I Became a pro member a month ago and thanks Rand and the team for putting together a crazy collection of tools!
Thanks,
Mike
I think,
May be in the beginning your 2nd point is right but in the longer run i believe, reputation will take its part (may be through social signals)
I think If the same topic is choosen to write and even if a authority site have a bit low quality content it will rank above a website with a low authority. Since content is just one factor among hundreds others in ranking algorithm.
I disagree with your second point. It would be a very naive search engine that only ranked content based on freshness with paying a lot of attentio to the reliability of the source as well.
From what I've seen so far, Google is definitely weighing timeliness much more heavily than reputation. A blog with low traffic can outrank one with much greater traffic/reputation by having the most recent update. It's kind of a dilemma, because the first site to break the news most likely will not be on the top of the page as more and more sites pick up the story. Early birds don't win, the most recent bird does.
So people will be forced to update their articles regulary.
Somehow this is what Google is trying to do at the moment! either update or die!
That means need to hookup & work hard to post recent news asap.
"Early birds don't win, the most recent bird does" - what happens if the early bird accrues links, likes and plusses due to being first? Does that help them stay on top?
Seems to me that SEOmoz needs to do an experiment.
Release a post on something topical and two hours later do a post on the same topic but from a blog with a lot of authority, and then two hours later from a blog with similar authority to the first post. (Three posts in all). Ask mozzers to like, link and tweet the very first post, and then see how it does against the other two.
Before this update, the authority blog (#2) would always come on top, unless #1 accrued a mighty amount of links. Now? It looks like they are saying #3 will win, but we won't know till it is tested.
G appears to be struggling with how to decide what an "authority" is. There are many areas where social signals can be easily manipulated by sites with far less knowlege of the topic or authority in the ordinary (street) sens of the word. So, he who buys the most followers, friends, etc. wins? From what I've read on these boards, only Rand and a couple of other regulars are even registered (or whatever G's term is for signed up) as authorities. But G's lack of concern makes sense given their incentives. Determining true authorities will be rather expensive if they are serious about it. If G assigns sufficient weight so that people find and contact authorities directly from the authorities' own sites, what happens to all those middlemen posting fresh (or even user generated) content intended to sell Adwords?
Surely the opposite is true? The earlier you act the less fresh your content will be when it comes around to being searched?
I.e. If you update your sitemaps and blog at 10am and I do it at 5pm a user searching at 8pm will see my 3 hour old results before your 10 hour old results (if we take 'freshness' as the sole basis of separation).
I am now imagining conference presentations where people tell you how long after a type of event you should publish your data
I wonder what makes someone a celebrity? You could write about ones who are not making headlines right now to get some serious time as the most recent report
I would imagine the speed at which things are indexed will also be important - there's no point being fresh if it takes so long to index that more recent contributions are already available.
Early Bird gets the worm...well said.
So hew QDF algo, ha? I wonder how well can you rank for a certain keyphrase if you post a nice piece of content in a note at a Facebook page (huge domain authority) then give it a few G +1's (Google's own "social signal") and a few tweets as well (third party "social signal").
I bet you'll easily get to top10 for at least a few hours!
Anyone feels like running this test? :)
Rank love you man, I was quite confused, how to figure out this new update. Now it’s clear to me, Google had made changes to search results. you are the man!!
Thank goodness! All my prattling on to clients about fresh content and social is finally paying off! Great post, thank you :)
Depends... If your client, for instance, is a car component factory, the freshness update is not going to really impact your site. At least if you have not provided your client site of a constantly up to date industry blog. But that would have been a good idea independently by the the QDF tweak of yesterday, as it is a fundament component of a well balanced inbound marketing campaign.
As a user, there are regularly times when I add "2011" to queries to try and find up to date information, so hopefully this will be of assistance.
Areas where this could be relevant are technical queries where results are coming largely from messageboards and forums or searches interpreted by Google to relate to current events.
I'd say mostly they could come under the umbrella of searches relating to 'Things That Have Happened', whether it's a global news event, or software on a computer performing unexpectedly, or a stage of a child's development or any number of things besides.
going towards RealTime search. that would be great. I really miss the realtime search on google.
thanks for this always-cool WBF!
Awesome WBF Rand and Mike! I wonder how will Google determine what deserves to be in the top of the SERPS whether it is fresh or not? Shouldn't quality be taken into account, otherwise you will have people just posting fresh junk every day to get seen more instead of putting together excellent quality.
If you just posted a blog post, how can Google determine so quickly whether that blog post is any good or not or relevant to a lot of people. I understand they could look at how its shared within social media but that can also be manipulated. Think ping.fm or hellotxt where you can have any new content pumped out to a bunch of other social networks with the click of a button.
Interested in learning more about this update, thanks guys!
Presumably Google will take into account site authority along with all the other usual factors for ranking.
Who losesThere is only so much room on the front page, if fresh content is pushed up, some one must be pushed down.What about indexing, if they are indexing sources of fresh content more often, then who is not getting indexed as often. Google is getting more like a news source then a index of the internets content. Often fresh just in news is not the quality and accuracy of what may be written with calm contemplation and hindsight. Sure its great for when you want the latest, but not so good for quality content, there is a trade off here.
Right but it seems to be based mainly on celebrity, entertainment and sports which makes sense since really when you search for certain info on those your probably looking for the most recent information. I don't think Google would be dumb enough to ruin their search engine by doing this for all keywords.
It is on 35% of queries, thats a lot, it is by the way queries not keywords as they point out.If you have a page about sports history you will lose out, even if your page is usefull
Hey this is good to know for me. I work on celebrity websites so I'll have to see how this effects traffic on their blogs when they talk about the t.v. shows and such. Should be interesting.
It's becoming rather amazing how many jobs google is possibly creating indirectly by giving so many different types of search results. It's almost like SEO is brancing off into different sections. What works for one industry may not even remotely work for another.
This update is definately going to increase the demand for writers.
Sounds like I should pick up my blog and social media conversations. Once a month or once a week might not cut it. Good push by Google to encourage more content. Great WBF guys, thanks for being SOO current. And, it was nice to see Mike up there. I always read his comments, awesome to see him in action..
I can't help but see a correlation between the last couple estimted "percentage affected" quotes that Google has given us. When they want to fly under the radar with the (not provided) BS, they give us a "less than 10%" estimate. However when it's something that THEY want, it's a much larger percentage @35%. I guess only time will tell with each change how much we're actually affected.
It will be interesting to see whether authoritative scaper sites will benefit from the update or not. Low authority sites which do not get indexed regularly may suffer unless they work on indexation.
Apart from RSS and XML sitemaps saving on crawl budget will play a big part as well.
I've written a post about the challenges and the quick wins which has been published at https://connect.icrossing.co.uk/thoughts-googles-fresh-algorithm-update_7339
The QDF concept is not new so it's interesting that Google felt the need to announce the world that they are making big changes to the amount of Queries that deserve freshness and/or the amount of Freshness that these queries deserve. Will be interesting to see over the next days what kind of results webmasters report they are seeing.
Fantastic stuff. Glad to know that when a change is rolled out we can count on Moz to give us the 411 on what adjustments need to be made. And glad to see my buddy Mike making his WBF debut!
Great WBF!! One you're able to break it down, it doesn't seem to be such a dramatic change as they let on!
Fortunately this is not effecting our local keywords (yet), but I do see SERP changes for non-local (albeit niche) keywords that we are ranking for. Looks like freshness is still only one factor of many as an older post with more PA is still outranking me. From the perspective of a user, I find the "born-on dating" to be very useful.
What do you think, if i post some fresh blog and news update and then someone else posted the same but this time this blog have good reputation than me over the internet, will my blog stay on top at this time???
Maybe not - Sad isn't it
yEah
Well, correct me if I am wrong but I think we can claim ownership of our content with the author tag, its something we are about to implement.
The I believe you will always take precedence as the site that 'owns' the content.
Let me know your views!
speculatively, its looking more and more like we are moving towards authority aligned (or more affected)with freshness. But then this simply means that the more you are updating (quality) content/news on your blog, article etc then you will be recognised as such and therefore be seen to have more authority on the said subject matter you are writing/reporting on (and hence have more influence as a result?). Speculating further, this may translate to a little more search engine page elevation in the big G. But all still specultation here.
Great Video - Very Informative - Thank you!
I am new to this blog and must say you guys are really doing very good job. Thanks for this wonderful Post
Great WBF again. Google have taken this step for providing best user experience. Now they find the latest and fresh information for each search term called Freshness Algorithem. Quite a useful update and definately this will help a lot to many Google users.
Thanks for this wonderful Post and Thumbs up for sure....!
SEO is about basics and common sense. Without any "advanced" insights one can say that to outrank your competition you just have to be better then them. Better backend-frontend, better UX, better contents, better value.
What you define as "BASIC" is not so basic at all, or - at least - simple. If not everybody would be an Seo, also my Mom. And common sense is surely not a mainstream quality ;).
The thing with SEO is much like with stock markets. All the information is available to everybody, but its hard to find the most relevant info with all the hype and noise around it.
Regarding you Mom:
If your Mom would like to improve her business in serps, she would without any SEO specific knowlege out of common sense:
a. write relevant contents to appeal to visitors.
b. make her site simple and goal oriented
c. advertise her site in local area.
basic SEO 101
Nice post! A little audio tip: It's great with stereo sound, but it's too much - You should pan max. 35% to each side, otherwise it sounds like you are standing right next to me instead of in front of me when listening to the video on a headset :-)
Thanks Rand & Mike for this wonderful conversation. Well, its time to update your blog or site regulary like we do our basic thing such as tweeting on twitter, updating on facebook etc. which is really a daunting task but hopeful that it'll make us to work hard more & come up with new ideas.