Earlier Today, Google announced that they are implementing a major algorithm change. The major motivating factor behind the update is the Caffeine web indexing system that was implemented in June of last year. The Caffeine indexing system revolutionized the way Google could crawl and index new information placed on the web. Google often tried to make the comparison between an old 2 dimensional indexing system and the new 3 dimensional model. Caffeine strives to bring users the best search results as possible, and in many cases this also means the newest content possible.
Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. @ Carrie Grimes
The amount of information that Caffeine is able to process is astounding. Never before has there been a search provider that could index in such a manner. The hardware is able to index hundreds of thousands of websites in parallel. In the past, due to the way Google indexed websites, it could take over a month for a page to be recognized by the algorithm. Now, Google is indexing a portion of the web ever day in order to find as much current information as possible. I am sure there are specific parts of the web that get indexed more regularly than others. Think MSNBC, FoxNews, CNN and so on. When people search “news” they probably want the most up to date page for their favorite news organization. Not a BBC article from 5 years ago. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo and Bing have to make many improvements if they want to be able to compete with Google after their merger.
@Google Webmaster Blog
Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. @ Carrie Grimes
Well, this revolutionary indexing system is what laid the foundation for the recent search algorithm change. With the capability to crawl and index websites at a the fastest rate in the world, it is only natural that Google would want to use this information to help in determining search ranking positions for websites. A website that updates daily surely provides users with more content that is relative to today, than a site that updates once a week. In the past there was no way to rank websites based on “freshness”, but as of today there is. I have not heard an official title for the change, so for now I am just going to refer to it as the Freshness update.
What effect will this have on me?
Google has stated that the algorithm change is going to affect 35% of the web in some way or another. So this change is either going to be a very good thing for your website, or potentially detrimental. This seems to be another attack on affiliate marketers, as the change on Oct. 14th seemed to target bridge pages. There is a list of reasons why the Freshness update will hurt many affiliate marketers.
- Most affiliate marketing websites consist of 10-20 static pages. The content is never updated so they will constantly be outranked by other sites in the same niche who create fresh content daily.
- It seems that backlinking will now interact differently with the search engine. Small websites that are meant to rank #1 for their target niche keyword rely on links to old pages that are never updated. If Google is now taking the age of a page into consideration, they must also look at the age of the backlink as well.
- Many affiliate marketers want to build a “set it and forget it” website. Something they can create once and never touch again, just ranking with age and incoming links. Now inbound links will only be helpful if they are from other regularly updated sites.
The Freshness update has implications for many different types of search terms. Google has laid out at least 3 different types of search that require different “degrees” of freshness. For instance there are a group of search queries we will call current events. During the Los Angeles fires in 2009, when I searched “los angeles fire” it was implied that I was looking for the latest news updates regarding the situation. Google was not as sophisticated then, so there were some local news links, but there were also search results suggesting the Los Angeles Fire Authority, historical information about past fires and so on. The Freshness update should help Google provide results that consist of current information regarding breaking news stories.
Another type of search query that might require freshness of a different “degree” are re-occurring events. Well known events that happen on a timeline are also effected by the Freshness update. If you are searching for “Superbowl” you are most likely looking for information regarding the upcoming Superbowl, not one the happened 15 years ago. The recent algorithm change will take this into consideration when providing search results. Websites that have information regarding the upcoming Superbowl will most likely outrank those that are Superbowl related, but not associated with the current NFL season. How Google plans to accomplish this is still somewhat of a mystery, but the Caffeine indexing system is obviously an essential part.
Search queries that don’t necessarily correspond with breaking news, or re-occurring events will also have time associated with the results. Many people search online for product reviews before purchasing anything in a store. Thanks to the Freshness update when looking for “best cpu review” results will only be displayed for recent products and reviews. You will no longer have to filter through links reviewing cpu’s from 5 years ago, only results relevant to the current time will be displayed.
You can read more about the changes here.
