The 5.4 magnitude Indiana earthquake woke me up this morning around 5:30. I’ve lived in L.A. for three years, so I’m used to the sensation. I always think at first that an earthquake is a bus, dumptruck, garbage truck or other large desisel vehicle driving by. Since I didn’t hear anything break, I just rolled over desperate to catch a few more moments of sleep before starting my day. When my alarm went off an hour later at 6:30 I was curious to confirm that it really was an earthquake I had felt. So, I powered up my laptop and Googled “indiana earthquake”. Sure enough there at the top of the listings was a news report from a southern Michigan news station about the earthquake. From the article I learned the exact time, location and magnitude of the quake.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lesson I learned from this is that Google absolutely loves fresh content. The page that was listed number one didn’t have the strongest link profile, but it definitely had the freshest content.
I recently read a Popular Mechanics interview with one of Google’s search engine gurus, Udi Manber. In it he discussed how Google gives special weight to freshness as part of their efforts to provide the most relevant search results:
“The query was, New York Times address. And you would think you’d understand the query, and the first result right there on the snippet gives you The New York Times. It turns out that’s not what the user was looking for. They were looking for an address given out by a New York Times reporter the day before. And because of this diversity and because of our emphasis on freshness and highlighting fresh results, that particular address appeared somewhere in the results, and that’s what the user wanted—that’s what they went to and got the result.”
Having read this interview just a couple days ago, I was pretty confident I would get the news I needed when I Googled ‘indiana earthquake’ this morning. I was really impressed that in less than an hour, Google had crawled, indexed and appropriately ranked the freshest content.
So, how can you take advantage of the fact that Google loves fresh content? Two of the best assets you can have to keep fresh content on your site is an easy to use Content Management System (CMS) and a blog that feeds to your home page. The CMS will allow you to easily update content throughout your site; a blog that feeds to your home page will help you to post a steady stream of topical and relevant content to your site and most importantly to your home page.
What’s even better is I new without getting out of bed that it was earthquake because someone I follow on Twitter was up and researching for me. An hour later the local TV news still didn’t know what happened.
darn it… knew, not new.
Brian, what a neat story. I love hearing Twitter stories. Twitter and social media in general are pretty amazing at their ability to move faster and more powerfully than most anything else on the net. Check out this story from CNN about a reporter who used twitter to get out of an Egyptian jail. A significant caveat to social media, though, is that it is only as strong as your social network.