Anyone who's ever dabbled in SEO will either be already aware or very interested in the news that Google has recently updated its search 'algorithms'. For those whose job it is to keep their website in the top page rankings for particular search terms, the rules that the search giant uses to determine 'relevance' are of key import. Techcrunch implies that recent content is now given more preference but I think that this has been the case for some time now; it may be that it's been turned up a notch. For anyone searching for archive information, preference given over to blogging or 'almost realtime' content isn't necessarily ideal - but then, that is what the Advanced Search is for. More importantly, SEO gurus who are using 'links' strategically to influence page rankings may be feeling a bit sick today.
Google Operating System points out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content. The example provided would seem to favor the conclusion; TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position. Indexing recent posts has been a strength for Google, to the point that at least for areas like Blog Search they’ve become the defacto standard as others such as Technorati have struggled to keep up. That Google would preference recent posts in its search results without the usual incoming authority links throws out the rules we’ve always known with Google, and I’m not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. It would depend a lot on the results, but it would limit attempts to game Google results through incoming links. Perhaps it’s the first step towards Google embracing Web 3.0 with semantic search that learns as it goes, constantly updating its results to suit the user at the time they are searching, complete with contextual awareness as well.
Source: TechCrunch