Rand: Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I am joined by none other than Mike King. Mike, so great to have you.
Mike: What's going on, Rand? Thanks for having me.
Rand: Mike is out of Publicis in New York. He spoke recently at the Search Love Conference and spoke here at the Seattle Interactive Conference.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: Getting big on the scene. And Mike, we've got some supposedly big changes from Google coming out today.
Mike: We had the Google Freshness update today.
Rand: So Google announced it, right? So Amit Singhal, head of Search Quality at Google, writes on the blog and he says a few things, and we've got some questions about this. He says, "Google's new Freshness Update affects 35 percent of queries. It prioritizes recent and timely results, and it's based off their Caffeine infrastructure."
Mike: So far what we're seeing is it's 35 percent of queries, but I think people are expecting that to mean 35 percent of keywords. That's not what's happening. So we're seeing it on a lot of head terms. For example, here's a SERP that we saw for football. What we're seeing is really recent posts being annotated to the SERPs, so they're having 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, 18 minutes ago.
We're also seeing that for basketball, Microsoft Courier, Wall Street, and Top Chef Texas. You can google those right now and see these in the SERPs. Rand: When they say affects 35 percent of search results, and we're seeing, like, boy, it feels a lot more subtle than Panda. A lot of SEOs are like, "Boy, 35 percent of queries. You said Panda only affected 11 or 12 percent." Something feels disconnected. Talk about the difference between affecting keywords versus affecting query volume.
Mike: Right. When they're saying 35 percent of queries, these are words that people are actually searching for. It's not necessarily just every keyword in the keyword universe.
Rand: Gotcha.
Mike: So it could be a much smaller set of keywords than we're talking about here.
Rand: If 10 percent of people in the world google "Kim Kardashian wedding," tragically - they really shouldn't, but they do - then that could be a huge part of what they're saying is affected here.
Mike: Absolutely. That's what we're seeing, a lot of celebrity keywords that are being affected. But that kind of makes sense because those are inherently QDF keywords.
Rand: Right. Query deserves freshness. One of the things that we noticed is it seems to help lots of date-specific content, not just hyper- new, meaning some of these results are 8 hours ago, 3 hours ago, but we're also seeing a lot more stuff that's . . .
Mike: It's like two days ago or seven days ago, but it's all date-specific, like you're saying.
Rand: Yeah. Then there are some of these new annotation types of results. So this, fundamentally, looks different to us. It's not site links.
Mike: Absolutely. They're direct links to individual articles rather than site links.
Rand: And we think these are RSS-based. Is that right?
Mike: Absolutely. So we did a few, like, poking around a few different feeds and things, and we saw that they did match up almost directly with the RSS feeds.
Rand: So if you're trying to illustrate specific content in your fresh links, which Google is now providing you an opportunity to do, RSS seems to make a ton of sense.
Mike: Definitely. For example, they have the last mod . . . what's the word?
Rand: Oh, the last modified date? You mean the stamp?
Mike: Right, exactly. So that time stamp seems to be something that's affecting that. So keep those up-to-date, and your XML sitemaps could definitely help with this.
Rand: Right. We were talking about the Top Chef Texas query. And when you look at the Top Chef Texas page today, it's basically Bravo TV, and then every result in there is from the last 12 hours.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: Meaning, Mike, you and I write a great blog post about Top Chef Texas last week, and it's ranking well. Today, forget about it.
Mike: Yeah, you really have to stay on top of it. So if you're writing content about Top Chef Texas, make sure that you continue to have content on it. That's like a TV show that happens regularly. If you're going to do that, you need to write about every episode to stay on top of it.
Rand: Yeah. And this is kind of a big change for Google.
Mike: Definitely.
Rand: So that could be part of that 35 percent that it's affecting.
Mike: Absolutely.
Rand: I'm going to make you come this way with me. We've got some takeaways for marketers here. One of the ones, tell me about this, "Watching Your Important SERPs for Signs." How do I check this? How do I check whether I'm going to be affected, and what search results should I be watching? If we're talking about most important SERPs, we've got to thinking about things that drive the most conversions, the thing that drives the most traffic, and the thing that drives the most engagement. And then for fresh and time saved content, basically if you're seeing . . .
Mike: Blog posts.
Rand: Yeah. If you're seeing the eight hours ago, you're seeing the days, you've got to do that. I mean, you and I are both huge believers in this, right?
Mike: Absolutely. Content marketing, if you're not doing it, like it's says, you're crazy.
Rand: You crazy. I wrote that there.
Mike: He did. He did.
Rand: And then finally, we've got to watch whether and how Google is grabbing this time stamped content. We have some questions about the RSS feeds are being pulled in here. It doesn't always seem to be just the most recent items.
Mike: It doesn't seem to be like a one-to-one thing, so it's hard to say. Maybe they're looking at shared or how much is being pushed on social.
Rand: Google+.
Mike: Exactly, Google+, how many people are pressing that magic +1 button. So it's hard to say, but I would venture to guess that they're thinking about social, because if it's the most relevant, it makes more sense that it's shared the most.
Rand: And if it's coming from RSS, they've got have all that data about who's clicking on those RSS feeds.
Mike: Absolutely. Like Will Reynolds was saying, they own FeedBurner, so they have all this data. Are people reading this stuff?
Rand: Sure.
Mike: So this may be that final application of it.
Rand: Fascinating. All right. So supposedly there's a huge change, but we're not feeling it nearly as dramatically as Panda.
Mike: Not at all.
Rand: So we'll see how this rolls out. I certainly look forward to comments and feedback from you guys. Mike, thank you very much for joining me. Appreciate it.
Mike: Thank you for having me.
Rand: Cheers, gang.
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