Google recently issued another significant alteration to its search algorithm. As we know, and as Google has told us many times before, it is constantly working to adapt and evolve search, and while little tweaks don’t warrant announcements, the latest efforts to increase the timing relevance of search results does.
To provide the freshest results possible, Google says some 35 percent of search results will be affected. And now, some four days after the announcement, we’re beginning to see some winners and losers. Searchmetrics used its in-house SEO database to determine the early findings. “Our metric for that is the SEO Visibility. It is a metric based on the search volume of a keyword, the type (informational, navigational or transactional search) and the rank of a URL.”
Unlike Google’s Panda update, this particular iteration of the search algorithm isn’t dealing devastating blows to news sites—instead, helping a great many. Generally, news, broadcasting, and brand sites received the biggest boost. Funny or Die, Rate My Professors, Scridb, Engadget, BusinessInsider, Last.fm, Soundcloud, and Rhapsody were among the winners (see both lists in their entirety below).
There was no classifier among the losers, which is a veritable hodgepodge of websites. The Gawker property Jezebel, Gizmag.com, American Express, and Google’s own Blogger were on the hit list.
Google is often criticized for the secret sauce behind page rank, which is more than fair given the control the company has over the fate of Internet properties. But at first glance this freshness update does seem to be surfacing more real time results and there aren’t any red flags to point out just yet (i.e., why exactly did DHGate.com get such a huge boost from the Panda update?).
The winners
The losers
