Who wants to know the age of Justin Bieber’s girlfriend in 2005?!
This statement was exactly what the former Google search director said in 2011 at the time of the unveiling of the Freshness algorithm. This algorithm caused a lot of changes in search results at the beginning of the unveiling. According to statistics, about 35% of ranking websites in the results of the first pages of Google, after the start of the Freshness Algorithm, changed their rankings, and this issue really worried many webmasters.
In this article, we are going to comprehensively introduce the freshness algorithm and then teach you the important and key points of website optimization and content for this algorithm.
Why was the freshness algorithm created?
The process of content production has been and continues to be on the rise. In 2010, it was predicted that the volume of content produced, in 2017 alone, would be more than the information produced 5,000 years earlier! Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Google.
To show the best results to its users, Google creates and updates many algorithms. Algorithms work on things like:
- Copy of content
- Website validation
- Distinguish low-quality content
- And…
Originally, the freshness algorithm was created to solve the problem of users dealing with old content! In other words, freshness’ job is to increase the ranking of new content over the old content. With the help of this algorithm.
With the freshness algorithm, will all new content reach the top of Google results?
Certainly, the answer to this question is no. Don’t forget that SEO is like a sports competition. If an athlete only has good nutrition, it cannot be said that they will definitely win the final race. Freshness algorithm and new content are just one of the important points to win this contest, which of course is not the same for all websites.
Ultimately, it’s up to Google to figure out which content is important to the user. But in general, according to the company’s guidelines, the focus of Google’s freshness algorithm to increase the ranking of new content is more on the following websites:
- News
- Event
- Videos
- Downloads
How does Google detect the difference in user content?
Imagine that you have optimized your website after a long time and with a lot of effort on web design. You’ll enjoy the top rankings for a week, but after a while, one of the competitors will overtake you by publishing an article or building a newer service page.
Google is well aware of which businesses should be looking for new content and which should focus on other SEO features.
But how does Google understand this? The most important thing that helps Google understand this very important issue in the discussion or title of the topic.
When all of a sudden all the websites write about a new topic and many users search for related phrases, Google notices a new event and seeks to increase the ranking of the latest content.
How to SEO and optimize your website for the Freshness Algorithm?
From the examples we gave at the beginning of this article, we found that the freshness algorithm does not focus solely on top topics and news, and may depend on other types of content as well. But the ultimate goal of this algorithm, like other Google algorithms, is to display more productive and useful content to the user. So there is no reason why your content should lose the ability to compete with new content if it fully optimized.
So here are some tips for optimizing new and old content for Google’s new algorithm.
Update your content
The first important thing to improve website content and compete with new pages in the world of SEO is updated content. You need to make sure that the content on your website’s pages is useful to the user in the present time. Your old content useful when it provides the user with the content they need.
In this case, you can keep the previous article on the page and provide a complete explanation about the new topic or updated versions. Now it’s hard to compete, even with new content. Keep in mind that content doesn’t just mean adding a little bit of text, code, tag, or image. If for example, you have written articles about teaching a 2018 version of Photoshop software, after the release of the 2019 version of this program, you should update the article according to the changes in the new version of the software.
Be sure to optimize your content not only for Google, but also for the user, and make sure that even your former user learns something new after reading the new part of the article. The presence of audio and video formats that increase the satisfaction of your users also has good results in terms of content delivery.
Be quick to publish new content
For example, when you search for a “new Moz algorithm” that is related to the sudden changes in the Moz website’s domain validation algorithms, you see websites that publish news and articles about an event faster than other competitors have higher ranks.
So be as active as possible in your field and publish news content and other content quickly. Quick content dissemination is one of the things that can make you more successful in dealing with the freshness and SEO algorithms.
Don’t overlook the power of social media
Posting content on social media is one of the signals that will affect your website’s ranking. What does this signal have to do with Google’s freshness?
Many webmasters deal with the fact that their unique and quality content is copied by another website after publication, and surprisingly, the website ranks well in the results with their content.
This is because most content-copying websites have a higher index speed than other websites. These websites use special robots to steal new content from other websites, and because the content on their website is displayed to Google for the first time, Google identifies them as the owner of the content. To prevent this from happening, post your content quickly on social media (especially Twitter) and get links from them so that Google can identify you as the content publisher. Be sure to pay attention to this when publishing news and first-hand content.
Create a valid backlink
Your content may have been linked from various websites at the beginning of the publication. But don’t just follow these old links. The backlinks of your old content are probably taken from the old content of other websites! To build new backlinks to your website page, go for new content to get more attention to the freshness algorithm. Newly published content from reputable websites will greatly increase the ranking of your new or updated content.
Publish evergreen content
And last but not least. evergreen content is content that no longer constantly needs to update to the latest audience tastes. That content no longer needs to be updated and can always (or for a long time) meet the needs of the search user.
Google measures the evergreen nature of your content based on user behaviour. If the time spent on your website was on that page for 3 minutes at the time of publication, but after one year the time was reduced to 30 seconds, it is a strong indication that your content is no longer as useful to the user as before; But if users still behave well with your content over time, Google will realize that your position on the front page is good for you and them.
last word
As a final word, we should mention webmasters who understand the value of day-to-day content delivery for Google and implement this technique seamlessly on all of their content. This may initially increase the number of pages in the results, but if the added content fails to get the user exactly what they want, the page rank will eventually decrease.
We hope this article has been helpful to you; if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
