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Article by Matthew Fielding on November 9, 2011.

About Matthew Fielding

Matt is an Online Marketing Consultant at Custard Media with a background in SEO copywriting. Contact me on
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Earlier this year Google updated their ranking algorithm with the infamous Panda Update and this week followed it up with an even more important change.

However, despite the fact that this new ‘Freshness Update’ affects nearly three times as many searches as Panda, the online community hasn’t paid nearly as much attention.

They're lemons, not oranges. Just saying.

This is mainly down to the fact that rather than punishing sites and causing widespread panic which forces site owners into action, the Freshness Update offers a great opportunity to improve SEO rankings – which means the majority of lazy webmasters and SEOs won’t do anything about it.

So what exactly is the Freshness Update all about?

Google’s Freshness Update & SEO

The Freshness Update will improve rankings for:

• Sites with up-to-date information about annual or recurring events
• Pages with fresh information about current events, even if they have no links or are just minutes old.
• Pages containing the latest updates about new products or new information in general

This means that we should no longer see high-ranking results for:

• Last year’s occurrence of a recurring event – for example the FA Cup Final
• Last week’s reports about current news stories, when newer information has been posted today
• Older product information – for example iPhone 4S reviews from the day of release, as long as updated information has been posted since.

As SEOs, this presents opportunities that previously weren’t available to smaller clients or those with little to no domain authority, as long as we’re quick off the mark.

For example, if Apple suddenly announce that the iPad 3 will be released, we’ll be adding a blog post about it to our iPad insurance website, insureipad.co.uk.

As long as we’re ahead of the game, this should mean that we appear highly in the search results quickly, without having to wait weeks for the results of a careful link building process.

If we keep updating the post when new information comes out, we should maintain that ranking in the long term. Or, we could add a new post and repeat our success.

It’s not clear which will be the better strategy, but we’re looking forward to testing it – and even if the high ranking only lasts a short while, the spike in traffic will provide excellent brand exposure, so it’s win-win.

Just a shame most SEOs will be too lazy and/or stuck in their ways to even try it.

Related posts:

1. What is Freshrank?: SEO Preston #37 Following last week’s post about Google’s Freshness Update I’ ve been glued to the SEO airwaves to see what other...
2. Google Panda Update – 6 months later… SEO Preston #30 In February Google put the fear of God into webmasters across the world by rolling out a major algorithm update...
3. The Google Overoptimisation Update & SEO   Google’s Matt Cutts recently let slip that Google’s next update would target sites that were overoptimising for their target...