Google’s search engine algorithm utilizes dozens of factors to calculate a result’s placement in the search engine. The latest update to the algorithm highlights the “freshness” of results, adding additional ranking points for entries that were recently published. This helps searchers find relevant and accurate information, rather than old or out-of-date information. For search engine marketers, this means that you’ll start losing organic hits on your older content immediately and gaining SEO for newer content.
The Return of Blogs
To start, this will bump the value of blog feeds in the search engine results. You can start using your blog immediately as a source of fresh information for Google to index. While they have always been of value in terms of providing interaction with users, host content, and engage your customers in conversation, blogs will now be more of a driving force in search engine optimization as they start to show up more frequently in the search engine results.
While the use of blogs is already highly encouraged, and this is unlikely to reflect a big shift away from the normal way of doing business, it does allow an opportunity to increase investment in blogs and post content on a more regular basis.
Social Feeds and RSS
Like blogs, social feeds and RSS have not been removed from the online search marketing toolkit, but their relevance for increasing SEO has declined somewhat. The freshness update, however, will allow you to expand your social profile further, creating further organic search benefit than it previously did. This means social profiles can do triple duty: they serve the purpose of socially networking with customers, increase your site-wide organic search engine results, and now, promote individual content items that have a higher potential of appearing at the top of search engine algorithms.
For marketers already engaged in providing relevant up-to-date content, you’ll already see an increase in search engine traffic. For individuals who are relying more on older content to generate their search engine hits, it’s worth investing in new, high-quality content in order to maintain your visibility in search engines.
Image – © Andrea Danti – Fotolia.com
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
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