subject: The Google Freshness Update [print this page] A more recent change, however, will likely have less of an impact on your search engine optimization process than Panda did. Still, it is important to be aware of the Google freshness update and of the potential impact the update will have on your law firm internet marketing efforts.
Google announced its new "Freshness" update in a November 3rd blog post. In the announcement, Google stated that they had revised their search algorithm to make sure that web searchers received the most relevant and recent results to queries that were date sensitive, without even needing to type in the date. For instance, someone searching for information about a current event, such as the Olympics or World Series, could simply type in the name of the event and the top results would be the 2012 Olympics or the current years world series instead of pages of old data about outdated events.
Approximately 35 percent of Internet searches conducted on Google will be affected by the freshness update, but it is important to emphasize that this is 35 percent of searches, and not 35 percent of all keywords. This means that some keywords will not be affected at all by the change. Those keywords that are affected will mostly relate to current events or things that are more date sensitive. Such keywords are referred to as "query deserves freshness" keywords, or QDF keywords.
Your Law Firm SEO Efforts and the Freshness Update
While the freshness update my not effect all of your search engine optimization marketing efforts if the keywords you are targeting are not date-sensitive, you should still take note of the freshness update and what it can mean for you.
One thing that it can mean is that you may be able to get your content at a higher search engine position if you keep any date sensitive content up-to-date. Making sure that your time stamp is up-to-date for any content you publish is going to be the key to getting the Google spider to recognize the currentness of your content and is one basic step to take whenever you publish content. Using an RSS feed to publish new content is also a good idea, as Google's new crawler may be drawing from RSS feeds in making a determination on which content is fresh and new.
You also need to be sure that you are keeping your content new and fresh in order to continue to rank high on Google, especially, if your targeted keywords are date sensitive or QDF keywords. In order to determine how important this is to your law firm internet marketing efforts, you should check the search page for your query or targeted keywords to see if the most recent results are showing up first and if the information on the first page is limited to the past few days or hours. If your keywords are affected by the Google freshness change, making sure that you continually offer new and updated comments is going to need to become an essential part of your search engine optimization efforts.
