This week Google announced a new “Freshness” Update, which is said to affect 35% of all items searched. The idea is to keep the most current information on a query at the top of a search page. Fresh Content or content updated more recently/ including new content is more important than ever. Now don’t go changing your website every day to keep it Fresh. Some of the key factors associated with how Google determines Freshness is: 

1.     Inception Date – when your site was first crawled or discovered.

2.     Average Age of Document – determine age of your site by averaging out the age of its documents.

3.     Proportional Document Change – the amount of a page that stays static vs. the amount of a page that changes frequently.  An example being a homepage with blog content.

4.     Query Based Scores – popular queries can be ranked higher.

5.     Link-BasedScore– Assign Freshness Score based on freshness attributes of link documents.

Chances are you already have most of this in place on your website. If you are not it might be time to update your website. For more information on Google’s New Freshness Update check out Justin Briggs Blog or this great Whiteboard Friday Video with Rad and Mike discussing some of their early observations on the Freshness update.