Google continually tweaks its search algorithm but recently released a major update designed to show 50% “fresher” content. We have noticed a dramatic change in search results: a higher ranking is given to recently dated newspaper articles, blog posts, video posts and images. Spiders used to go out every two weeks to crawl sites and look for changes. Results shown in Google searches are not “live”, but based on results from the most recent index. The aim of the new changes is to pick up newer content, faster.
Implications for marketers: regular creation of key-word rich blogs and videos is paramount. The algorithm also reiterates the importance of quality links so a link from a sub page on a high page rank site such as Stuff or YouTube will count more than a link from a more prominent page on a lower page rank site (such as your own site).
Regular updates have been important. Now it is even more important that these updates take the format of video and blogs, and that you consider where this content is first placed.
We recommend:
- putting the content out there on “web 2.0 sites” with links (but not duplicated content) to your site
- regular short videos on Youtube (we have a great video HD camera for this if you would like help with scripting and editing)
- articles seeded on higher rank, high traffic sites linking to your own site.
If you would like to know more about page rank- a quality score that Google gives you from 0 to 10 based on a number of factors, the most important point arguably being the number and quality of links to your site – contact us and we’ll tell you what your page rank is, and what you can do to improve it. Have you noticed a change in the way your site ranks? We’d be interested to hear about observations from you on how results have changed.
