Google has done more tinkering with the algorithm so far this year than ever before. This is mainly due to playing catch up to what’s actually happening online. Whereas Google once gave credit and authority to valued, aged content that attracted lots of links over a period of time and hosted on a well established site, it now has to consider the speed at which stories go viral.
Two major changes that have happened is a leaning towards ‘freshness’ and ‘link velocity’. My recent story on Ashton Kutcher and Twitter quickly went to the top positions for a variety of keywords, I still hold two positions for ‘oprah twitter episode’. It was purely freshness and relevance that had helped.
Not so long ago quickly getting links into a page would have signalled something strange to Google, but now Google has seen the light, they realise that a breaking story will get syndicated and mentioned around the web, on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
So, the more conversations you join, the more likely your fresh content will gain links quickly and climb the rankings. In essence you need to:
- Have constantly fresh content
- Attract links quickly – Link velocity
- Get those links from trusted sites with a social element
The down side to this of course is what happened to certain car keywords, where spammers used it to build ranking to sell phony security software. Google have created some big holes with these changes that Blackhatters are exploiting, which means more changes to come.