Over the last few posts a common message coming through loud and clear is that ‘fresh‘ content delivered regularly is a key factor in effective SEO. For the SME it is a bigger challenge to create and deliver this content, often due to time constraints and no dedicated function within the business itself. My advice is to keep at it, persevere and you will soon see the rewards in your rankings. Start off with 5-10 minutes a day dedicated activity and build up from there.
The recent Google announcement
Google has just made one of the biggest tweaks to it’s search algorithm, now placing more emphasis on freshness.
Google said this Thursday; “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 what does this mean when searching online?
Google will now serve fresher results for recent & recurring events or hot topics that begin trending on the web. Google explained that when users search for this type of content, they will see more web pages that in some cases are just minutes old.
Google previously had a partnership with Twitter to deliver such content through their real-time search but in July this came to an end. When real-time search was removed from the Google search I was very disappointed. I liked how you had a choice to pull content from Twitter within the search results, very useful when you follow a lot of sport! As this relationship broke down it was only a matter of time Google would readdress this vital ingredient.
Real-time for SME’s
Use all the platforms at your disposal i.e. websites, blogs, social media and mobile to push out fresh content. If you have any news about your business or your industry get involved with the conversation and speak out.
With another recent announcement concerning Google charging for some Google Places listings, which I will cover in more detail in a future post, you cannot rely on a ‘one track’ online strategy anymore.
