Google announced today that they have made a significant improvement to their ranking system which will impact roughly 35 percent of searches and will better determine when to give more up-to-date results based on various degrees of freshness.  Depending on which search terms you use, this new “freshness” algorithm will figure out if the most relevant recent results are from an hour, day or week ago. Information today may be irrelevant tomorrow.
 
This update to Google’s search algorithm should be more noticeable for users than their recent Panda update which tries to combat the growing influence of low-quality pages posted from content-farms.  The update will put a stronger emphasis on how recently a page was posted or updated.  The new search is focused mainly on finding the latest news and updates to recent events.

What does this mean for your website? It means it’s time to give your website a freshness test. Is your site regularly updated? When was content last updated – this can include your blog, practice or attorney pages, images or firm news?

Don’t let your website rot – add some freshness to keep it alive.