Why should you care that Google is taking its caffeine fresh?
"Even if you don't specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent," says Google on its official blog.
If you want to rank well in Google, you need to freshen up your site.
That means your website might drop down the rankings if Google doesn't think the content is recent enough.
The search engineers are right of course: searchers expect the most up-to-date information. When you type "Olympics" into a search engine, chances are you're looking for next year's London Olympics, not the Beijing Olympics, which were sooooo 2008.
Last year Google tweaked things so that it could index the web to give "50% fresher results". It called the new index Caffeine.
A note about indexing: When you use a search engine you're not looking through the web "live", you're looking through an index generated by a robot crawling the internet periodically. There's a lag between a page being published or updated and the robot catching up with the change. The faster the search engine goes through the web, the more accurate the results because they're more recent. That's what Caffeine was about.
Last month Google announced it had gone further, giving you fresher, more recent search results. The change:
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.
That's big news: more recent content has a better chance of ranking high in search engines.
What does that mean to you?
Google is in the business of giving searchers what they want because that's what keeps us using them. You're in the business of being found online because that's how you get customers, especially new ones.
If Google thinks searchers want fresh content and you want Google to suggest your website to searchers, you need to be serving your content fresh.
How does Google decide that your site is fresh?
1. When you published
One indication is going to be when your information was published or last updated. If you put your website up two years ago and haven't added anything since, that's a signal that your content isn't recent and perhaps, therefore, not as relevant.
2. How often you publish
Another signal could be the frequency of your content. If you're updating your content frequently, it's a good signal that you're on top of your topic.
If you're in an area where things change frequently but your website doesn't, what does that say to an online searcher about your grasp of the material?
Maybe you don't think this applies to you because your site isn't about current affairs or a hot topic and you might be right but…
Are you in an area where things aren't "hot" but they change frequently?
Google gives the example of SLR cameras. They're not a hot topic or connected to a recent event but camera equipment is an area where change is frequent:
For example, if you're researching the [best slr cameras], or you're in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.
I write about self-publishing, you might be in financial services, medicine or another area where changes happen often. What if you're in the travel and tourism industry?
When I search for "holidays in Queensland" I'm looking for information about what's available now and even the future. I don't care what rates, packages, tours and offers were available last year. Google knows that so will favour pages that are fresh.
If you're in an area where things change frequently, the Google algorithim will know that and give additional weight to sites with new content.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is just a fancy way of saying "making sure Google thinks you're a good result for a particular search". All the best SEO practices remain. In fact frequently posting new content has always been a best practice; it just became even more important.
So what should you do?
These changes will affect 35% of results. That's enough to make a big difference to your search traffic. You need a content strategy to make sure your website is:
Relevant to the searches you want to show up in
Fresh thanks to recent and reasonably frequent updates
The opportunity for you
This change is certainly good for me because I advise companies on their online marketing strategies and I write content. It's great for you, too, because you have an opportunity to put distance between you and the competition by making your content more recent and more relevant.
If you'd like to talk to me about how I can help you to do that, email me and we can setup a time to talk. Why not make 2012 the year you used your site to bring you more business than ever before?
