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Google Freshness Update – Many winners, few losers

Yesterday Amit Singhal (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html) from Google confirmed a new bigger Google Index update. The impact on all the searches is approximately 35%, which is as measured by the number of searches every day really a lot. As opposed to the Panda update it has an impact of nearly the double amount of searches!

You can imagine how my heart beat was after I heard this news. Before there was no “name” for the update I thought about a cool name like “black widow update” or something similar because I assumed a hugh impact in the Serps.

In the description from Amit and in some articles like on Techcrunch http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/03/googles-new-algorithm-update-impacts-35-of-searches/ you’ll find more details. Google wants to supply the information need as the user want to have fresh content on a specific query or not. If you’re looking for event related content then you expect freshness and no content from old events e.g. if you’re looking for “olympics”. Then you get results for London 2012. On strong news related searches Google invented the QDF feature lots of years ago which also shows fresh articles especially newspaper content. But to analyze to type of the query and giving the user more fresh content is the right way to improve the quality of the Serps.

There is an impact on 1/3rd of all queries

If you think about the 35% again, then it means that one third of every query is related to fresh content. For webmasters with less new/fresh content it could be difficult to rank high because if the most of the queries you ranked in the past where outranked by fresh content (where linkpop should be  nonrelevant) you have to think about creating new content. The optimization of tag pages or static pages will be affected by this new update.

To get a better overview about the impact of the update in the google.com index I analyzed our current results we computed right after the update. Our metric for that is the SEO Visibility. It is a metrics based on the search volume of a keyword, the type (informational, navigational or transactional search) and the rank of a URL. The database is the biggest SEO database in the world and you can also check the results by yourself in our Searchmetrics Essentials software. There is also a free demo account after a 3min registration. 😉

Many winners, a few losers

Usually I post after those big updates at first the losers and then the winners. The reason is that there is mostly a correlation identifiable, like after the several Panda updates. This time I post the winners first. Because after this update I found NO type of losers but a lot winners which have lots of similarities. And this is also the correlation for this update. Google prefers sites like news sites, broadcast sites, video portals and a lot Brand sites. This is also a type of sites which have regularly fresh content and a big brand with higher CTRs.

In the list of winners you see many news, broadcasting and brand sites:

Domain SEO Visibility 11/06/2011 SEO Visibility 10/30/2011 Percent
Brand last.fm 1.386.908 1.232.115 12,56
Brand overstock.com 814.747 774.752 5,16
Brand lonelyplanet.com 412.446 377.565 9,24
Brand rockhall.com 62.610 36.387 72,07
Brand marthastewart.com 170.392 147.258 15,71
Brand wikiquote.org 315.054 292.471 7,72
Brand dominos.com 86.572 65.370 32,43
Brand papajohns.com 101.561 81.411 24,75
Brand squidoo.com 406.930 386.806 5,20
Brand soundcloud.com 229.032 211.331 8,38
Brand playstation.com 176.529 159.381 10,76
Brand comcast.com 187.415 170.841 9,70
Brand hotels.com 210.944 195.153 8,09
Brand vzw.com 54.978 40.428 35,99
Brand guitarcenter.com 103.490 89.295 15,90
Brand cox.com 91.860 80.679 13,86
Brand buy.com 163.761 152.926 7,09
Brand citibank.com 120.652 109.880 9,80
Brand scottrade.com 32.891 22.257 47,78
Brand aim.com 77.448 67.757 14,30
Brand southwestvacations.com 27.985 18.632 50,20
Brand boostmobile.com 39.996 31.092 28,64
Brand hawaiianair.com 35.970 27.076 32,85
Brand nationalcar.com 26.454 17.583 50,45
Brand skype.com 97.380 89.053 9,35
Brand garmin.com 71.229 62.918 13,21
Brand sonypictures.com 154.248 146.029 5,63
Brand opera.com 50.612 42.483 19,13
Brand napster.com 31.720 23.632 34,22
Celebrity news perezhilton.com 643.042 552.660 16,35
Celebrity news thehollywoodgossip.com 166.931 138.466 20,56
Celebrity news hollywoodreporter.com 219.287 201.657 8,74
Celebrity news hellomagazine.com 34.035 22.250 52,97
Celebrity news actressarchives.com 57.257 48.790 17,35
Government ny.gov 144.173 102.536 40,61
Government bls.gov 251.541 223.890 12,35
News huffingtonpost.com 1.895.562 1.782.006 6,37
News dailymail.co.uk 617.552 587.989 5,03
News allthingsd.com 63.558 42.620 49,13
News businessinsider.com 225.582 207.656 8,63
News nj.com 210.528 197.621 6,53
News rr.com 141.118 128.880 9,50
News medicalnewstoday.com 136.022 125.037 8,79
News christianpost.com 49.681 38.864 27,83
News salon.com 107.948 97.666 10,53
Tech news engadget.com 515.212 472.053 9,14
Tech news techcrunch.com 294.944 268.400 9,89
TV tvguide.com 697.920 663.713 5,15
TV aoltv.com 275.456 245.542 12,18
TV zap2it.com 301.686 282.817 6,67
TV buddytv.com 224.144 205.470 9,09
University pitt.edu 96.172 81.635 17,81
Video youtube.com 6.942.619 5.464.798 27,04
Video myspace.com 2.982.113 2.587.181 15,26
Video metacafe.com 367.335 338.992 8,36
Video break.com 211.243 189.391 11,54
Video funnyordie.com 189.309 169.583 11,63
Other familydoctor.org 150.551 122.338 23,06
Other rhapsody.com 128.108 107.650 19,00
Other examiner.com 97.413 80.017 21,74
Other theblackfriday.com 83.978 66.991 25,36
Other allthelyrics.com 48.348 32.342 49,49
Other ratemyprofessors.com 120.409 106.064 13,52
Other cheapoair.com 104.694 93.718 11,71
Other applebees.com 49.469 39.221 26,13
Other heavy.com 38.192 28.776 32,72
Other stars21.com 33.680 24.624 36,78
Other java-gaming.com 27.975 19.152 46,07
Other scribd.com 55.354 46.804 18,27

And here the list of loser. There is no one special group of losers like after all the Panda update.

Domain SEO Visibility 11/06/2011 SEO Visibility 10/30/2011 Percent
comcast.net 283.036 367.672 -23,02
state.ny.us 151.322 204.599 -26,04
univision.com 65.720 117.392 -44,02
usmagazine.com 210.329 254.976 -17,51
newseum.org 58.367 95.132 -38,65
the570.com 23.214 50.775 -54,28
americanexpress.com 109.808 132.096 -16,87
lyricspick.com 29.360 49.287 -40,43
capitalone.com 95.609 112.678 -15,15
peoplestylewatch.com 48.143 63.439 -24,11
realtor.org 30.849 44.230 -30,25
jezebel.com 63.698 76.736 -16,99
plentyoffish.com 30.987 43.898 -29,41
radioshack.com 41.279 54.039 -23,61
gizmag.com 41.630 54.231 -23,24
anandtech.com 37.963 50.435 -24,73
independent.co.uk 55.691 67.858 -17,93
cpsc.gov 62.175 73.974 -15,95
nj.gov 66.367 78.117 -15,042
stylelist.com 15.038 26.766 -43,817
justinbieberzone.com 23.903 35.292 -32,271
shoplocal.com 42.522 53.484 -20,496
hamstersoft.com 17.740 28.616 -38,007
bncollege.com 42.925 53.543 -19,831
mbnanetaccess.com 52.320 62.795 -16,681
blogger.com 40.172 50.426 -20,335
netscape.com 42.035 52.276 -19,59

So in the end, the update affected really a lot keywords. But it’s different to Panda and the right step for Google to satisfy the need of the user for the best search results.

Marcus Tober

Marcus Tober

My name is Marcus Tober and I’m the founder of Searchmetrics. Because we really love to analyze all kinds of online data, we can give you more insights than any other company in SEO, SEM and Social Media. It’s not a job, it’s passion.

11 thoughts on “Google Freshness Update – Many winners, few losers


  • Hi Marcus

    It would be interesting to see how things have evolved since you wrote this article. Have you made another update? Sometimes the loosers in time actually will get a net positive effect.

    Many regards
    Helle

  • Wow nice work! Thank you for sharing it with us – it must have taken you hours to gather all the information.
    As the post above says – it could be interesting to see if there have been any further news now.

    Regards
    Bo

  • Hallo Marcus

    Interesting, Google has to much power, but interesting artikel, good work 🙂

    Many regards

  • excellent site, very good information. Greetings.

  • Anleggsmaskiner 2012/08/25 at 10:44 pm

    Very good and usefull information, thank you Marcus and have a nice day

  • You are doing such a great work! Thank you very much for sharing with us such an useful and interesting information. Otherwise I agree with you, there were a few losers but not like after Panda.


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