Google's Freshness Update: what's the effect on websites?

Google has revealed that its latest algorithm update, the Freshness Update, will impact around 35% of searches.  But which sites are affected and how?

The thinking behind this update is that for many queries, searchers are actually looking for the latest, freshest content about a topic rather than older web pages.

One obvious example is if you type ‘Olympics’ into Google right now, you are more likely to be satisfied if you get results about London 2012 than older results about the games.

To get a better overview of the impact of the update on the google.com (ie Google US) index, I analysed our search analytics data right after the update.

The metric we focus on is SEO Visibility, an estimate for how visible a web page is on Google in a specific country, which is based on analysing search results for millions of keywords.

The findings of the main 'winners' are listed below. As you might expect, the update seems to have favoured news sites, broadcast sites, video portals and a lot of brand sites, sites which you’d expect to regularly load fresh content, as well having high clickthrough rates (CTRs).

If you think about the 35%figure again, what it means to me is that Google assumes that around one third of search queries are related to fresh content.

For webmasters with less new/fresh content this could make it difficult to rank highly. If most of the queries you ranked for in the past are outranked by fresh content (where link popularity will be less relevant), you’ll obviously have to think about creating new content more often.