Google Algorithm Change Impacts 35 Percent of Searches
By Anna Johnson on November 6th, 2011Google’s latest search engine algorithm will impact 35 percent of search engine searches, according to Google Fellow Amit Singal. Hint: it’s all about recency AND relevancy.
Google announced its new ranking algorithm change last Thursday. It builds on the Caffeine web indexing system, which Google introduced in 2010 to allow the search engine to quickly crawl and index the Internet for fresh content on a much larger scale than before.
The Google algorithm change is aimed at displaying the most relevant and recent results for hot topics, recurring events and information that changes often.
For example, Google will display real-time results i.e. pages that may be only a few minutes old if they contain the most authoritative content on a hot topic. In a similar vein, Google will display the most relevant recent results for regularly recurring events. In this regard, if you type in the name of an annual conference or event, Google will display the most recent example e.g. the London 2012 Olympics for a search on “Olympics”.
Finally, Google’s algorithm change also aims to display the most recent results for information that frequently changes but is not what you’d call a hot topic or recurring event. If you search for reviews on a particular product, for instance, Google will display the most recent reviews on the most recent model of that product.
These are all good moves that reflect Google’s progress towards better understanding and interpreting people’s searches. For Internet marketers and web masters the algorithm changes clearly means a greater bias towards the most recent content on a given topic, provided it is also the most relevant.
No question, a high search engine ranking is increasingly about being the most recent AND the most relevant. You might even say that being recent is integral to being relevant.
