For those sites that were affected by Panda’s big hand that slapped the daylights out of many marketers, there is something much worse coming. A new algorithm was just lauched, with little fanfare, that will basically remove stagnant pages in the Google search and replace them with more recently updated information.
According to Google:
Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old, -Amit Singhal , Google
Basically, if there is a news site that contains information about a topic, it will stasrt to show first in the search, over the sites that contain older information. The obvious result of this will be that news sites, especially larger ones, will start showing more often in Google than other types of sites. This gives a significant advantage to companies like CNN that already have have huge PageRank.
Of course, the other result is that marketers who work hard on ensuring that their content shows up on Google will suddenly find themselves kicked off of Google results, especially when it’s a new hot topic being covered by the news.
My buddies in Google wouldn’t confirm if this was targeting marketers specifically, but I got the idea that they were aware, that like the Panda update, the effect on article marketing will again be significant.
I’ve been told so far that as much as 40% of the search results will be greatly affected by this mechanism, meaning that results will be seen within days, if not immediately.
Is this an example of Google bowing to large news sites, or just trying to clean up their search to be more relevant?
