[Build Backlinks Online] Taking Advantage of Google's Bias Toward Hyper-Fresh Content - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Taking Advantage of Google's Bias
Toward Hyper-Fresh Content - Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfish
In the last year or so, Google has increasingly displayed hyper-fresh content
in SERPs, leading many marketers to think about how they can take advantage of
that preference. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains a few ways to go
about that without risking penalties.






Taking Advantage of Google's Bias to Hyper-Fresh Content - Whiteboard Friday






For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:



Video Transcription


Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week
I want to talk a little bit about Google's strange and overwhelming in some
cases bias to fresh content. I want to give a shout out to Glen Allsopp who had
talked about this a little bit and written some blog posts exposing some of
Google's priorities around freshness or what feel like priorities for them
around freshness.
Google's been biasing to fresh content, trying to show more and more fresh
results, recently published results in their SERPs for several years now, but
it's gotten particularly strong in the last 12 months in certain sectors. I
think Glen had noticed it very strongly in some of the sectors that he was
watching for some of his clients. We have seen it in some places very heavily,
in other places not as much. But you can definitely feel it.


There are places like Shakespeare plays. This is a search result that a few
years ago, even 6 to 12 months ago probably you would not have seen much
freshness, and now you're starting to see more and more of these types of
things, results that call out when they were published, a feeling that things
that are published more recently, even if they don't have as many links or as
good of keyword targeting or as authoritative a website, those kinds of things
are ranking a little bit higher. You're seeing news results in there, which is a
relatively new development, especially on a phrase like this which the intent
one might interpret as "well, they're probably looking for a list or maybe
they're looking for plays in their area."


So more and more of these cases Google is biasing to show recently published
results, and, because of that, there are some opportunities for folks in the SEO
field. If you're seeing this kind of thing in the results that you're looking
at, seeing a lot of dates, especially a lot of recent dates, in particular
recent dates on published content that seems to not have the ranking ability
that you would expect of the rest of the pages, you could use something like the
keyword difficulty SERPs analysis tool from Moz to kind of try and figure that
out. This may be a real opportunity for you, and there are a few ways that you
can take advantage.


Number one, I suggest these kind of anyway. This isn't a, "Oh, I want to
exploit something in Google's algorithm where they're weak, and I'm black hat,
gray hat, and I'm trying to exploit it." This is actually Google saying, "Hey,
we think users want fresh content, and so publishers please produce it because
we're willing to put it in front of our audience." I think that's just fine. It
could be that Google's a little over the line right now. Maybe they'll swing
that pendulum back over time.


But number one, find keywords and terms and phrases with fresh results, like
we talked about here, and then target them with some new content. Give this a
try. Essentially, if you're looking out and you're saying, "Gosh, this is a
hyper-competitive keyword. I'm not sure that I can normally rank here. Let me
see if I can get there for a day or a couple of days. Do I have the ability to
start ranking on fresh stuff?" If you can't hit the front page, the first page
of results with that particular phrase, try a little bit longer tail keyword
term.


Number two. If you have some old content, I think this is something that many
of us experience. We have older content that's targeting valuable keywords,
important keywords that are critical to our brand to attracting the visitors
that we want, and those have fallen down in the rankings. It may be that you
used to be in the top three or four, and now you're in the bottom half of the
top ten results or on page two or three. Consider an update. I've done this
several times and had a lot of success with it. Just updating an old blog post
or an old resource, making it fresh again, adding new things, things that have
emerged or come to light over the past few months or few years.


Then a republication or promotion. The critical thing here is to think about:
Do you want to produce that at the same URL, or do you want to do a redirect?
This is a little bit tough because, generally speaking, what I like to do is
keep these at the same URL if they are outside of an RSS feed. So, essentially,
not a blog post or not a news item or those kinds of things. I like to do the
redirection when it's, "Hey, I'm rewriting this old blog post. I've got a new
version of it. You know what? I'm going to 301 redirect that old version to the
new version." Or if I really want to keep it available at the old URL, I'll use
rel=canonical to say, "Hey, this is the more updated version. This is
essentially a duplicate, just a more recent duplicate, and here's the old one if
you want to see that."


Number three. If there are some hyper-valuable keywords that are consistently
showing fresh results, you're just seeing this over and over and over again,
well, maybe it's time for a regularly updated series. Think about columnists who
do syndication, or they write a weekly column on a particular topic or around a
specific subject or they do something once a month. This might be a big
opportunity for you to say, "Hey, you know what?
What's a piece of content that we could refresh every month, that would be on
this topic, and we could consistently be in those fresh results and we could
always be delivering the most recent, most valuable stuff?"


Good example is in the sports world. The sports world changes so fast. There
are different scores, different teams, rankings, standings. An old page is
nearly useless. Unless you're updating that page every time there's new
information, it's not that valuable. So I think those are exactly the kinds of
places where you might consider some form of regularly updated either series,
new posts, new publications, or a single page that you're regularly updating.


Then number four, in terms of doing some research to try and find these types
of phrases, obviously you can check out the SERPs if you're tracking in Moz
Analytics and you're looking at your search results. You sort of can see those
listed in there. But you might also use, to find some new phrases, things like
Google Trends, Ubersuggest, which scrapes Google's suggest results. News sites,
a lot of times when things are published that are news oriented, people will be
doing searches around them. You can look at aggregators like Reddit or Alltop,
social sites, obviously Twitter and Facebook, and these types of things to keep
an eye on that.


Double Click Ad Planner, which sort of has similar data too, but seems to be
slightly different than Google Trends, and sometimes you can see some more stuff
there, and Fresh Web Explorer, which of course is part of the Moz Analytics
research tools package to find those trends.


Last thing I'm going to say on this. There are a few rules that I have for
fresh content. First off, fresh content doesn't just mean recycling and
republishing. I realize that, because of this bias, sometimes, and Glen pointed
this out in some of his posts, that you can take advantage of this simply by
republishing similar content again and again. I would highly recommend against
doing that. I think you're putting yourself at risk for things like Panda if you
do it at a large scale or for manual penalties or for having low click-through,
low engagement, high pogo sticking back to the search results. That kind of
stuff is dangerous.


Make sure you're serving the visitor's intent. Remember that with fresh
content there's probably a recency intent on top of whatever other layers. So,
if I'm publishing something about Shakespeare's plays, I don't just want to
list, "Well, here are all the plays, and they were all written in the 17th
century or 16th century, and so they haven't changed. He's not writing any new
ones. Yes, but new things are constantly coming out. The news results show
different types of stuff. The quotes are showing which ones are popular. There's
a movies page that's showing which Shakespearean plays are being made into
movies or which new spin offs are being done with Shakespearean concepts in
them. So I do recommend that.


I also suggest, if you can, get your site, get your feed included in Google
news, and if that's not a possibility, at least have an RSS feed and be doing
social shares on top of the content that you're publishing.


Then last, but not least, be cautious about abusing dates. I realize that
there's a few folks in the gray hat, black hat world who have been doing this
and been having a little bit of success with it on and off, which is just sort
of modify the dates on the page of publication to fool Google. I don't know why
it seems to work sometimes. Or fooling them by adding new comments, which is
sort of weird. We've seen this a few times with Moz blog posts, where an old
blog post gets a comment. That comment has the date of the comment's
publication, and that actually will make the results show up with that newer,
fresher date, which is a little bit awkward and odd. I don't think that's a bad
thing if it's just happening naturally and Google happens to be messing up, but
if you're specifically abusing it, I think you could get into trouble.


So I look forward to reading some great comments about what you're seeing in
fresh results, how you're taking advantage of them. I'm sure you have some great
suggestions for our readers as well. Take care. We'll see you again for another
edition of Whiteboard Friday.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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