Having completed Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allowed Google to crawl and index the web for fresh content at incredible speed and on an very large scale, the company built upon Caffeine’s momentum, making an improvement to their ranking algorithm which impacts approximately 35% of all searches and determines when to give more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.
According to Google, “Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers”
The search engine will begin ranking results based on their ‘freshness’ though, there are numerous cases where some results which are a few years old might still be useful to the individual doing the searching, a good example would be recipes among others.
A large number of factors are mixed in Google’s ‘secret ranking formula’, and because of this it is not easy to estimate the precise impact which it will have on real estate websites exactly, but it is likely to shake it up a bit none the less, since properties which are for sale and for rent are time based, consequently falling into the ‘freshness’ criteria. Properties listed in the past 12 months (or longer) would automatically be de-selected in Google’s search, deemed too old to be relevant to the searcher.
The solution to this may be, for agents to ensure all new listings are loaded as soon as possible and kept ‘fresh’ throughout their listing life by regular updates to the post, so to avoid any possibility of dropping off the list into cyber oblivion, and consequently not being sold.
Read more about Google’s new search ranking algorithm here.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This change will also result in so much more ‘useless’ and regurgitated information from website owners just to appease Google.
Not so good for users
I know of plenty of web portals that are just sitting on page one in google search results which have not refreshed content for years. Hope that these will be recognized and dropped down to their more appropriate google rank.