I’ve read about it at the beginning of this year, but failed to see how it could impact SEO. I’ve heard nothing since but it’s been clearer and clearer why this is a very important change. You see, a great factor in ranking is the age of a domain/website. That means that normally the older you are, the better you’ve become and the more of an authority you’ve become. Sure, this is coupled with traffic, since without that you’d just be an old website, but still, it’s important.

photo credit: jared

However, starting this year Google has made a slight change which means that results also have a spice of recency to it. Let me explain. You see, on the web it’s only normal for news to be up high, everywhere you look. Blogs rank posts by recency, and so does flickr, youtube and basically everyone in the biz. However Google did not take this into consideration, well except for newest content in the sense of updated information. Now, on the other hand, Google treats them as news.

Still don’t get it? It’s easy as a concept. Rather than adding a bonus (or penalty) if you have updated content on your website, Google gives you a radical boost for a certain keyword, but for a limited time. When I first launched this website, it wasn’t really a launch but rather a measly splash screen (optimised though). When Google first got wind of it, and sniffing the stumbleupon traffic (i had a nice sketch of how the website would look in my head) it gave me such a boost that only one day after indexing i was ranked second for the very specific term of “eydryan”. Now this is a feat since I have an online presence and there are around 1500 results for that keyword to be outranked by an emptyish page. However, after Google saw that there was nothing interesting there I got quickly demoted to place 16-18.

Now for the fun part though. How do we take advantage of this? Simple, make Google know you’re a newsroom. Make him understand you always have new, fresh content, keyword rich and properly linked. Thereby, you will keep on riding the Google wave. Even now if you search for “eydryan” you’ll see it’s not my homepage, but rather one of my recent posts (and depending on data center and tld you’ll find it at positions 1 to 4, and sometimes with two entries). That means Google is giving me, a PR zero site the upperhand on even Cnet, which is a big player. Not to talk about propeller, etc. That is because Google gets updated content on eydryan from me almost every day. What more proof that I am a reference for eydryan.

Now this has been a sandbox experiment, and it has also proven that you can easily and quickly escape the Google sandbox by posting a lot of unique new content. Now it’s time to take it to the next level. A recent project, as i have mentioned in my last post, is to create a blog for a company i’m doing seo for. That means I’m battling big players and that I need to create something Google doesn’t find on those pages. Which is why I turn to SMO. The best supporting tool for this new algorithm is SMO.

So, let’s repeat how we can take advantage of the new change. We must create new, unique content, do it in a consistent and timely manner, and back it up with traffic from Social Media Networks and you have yourself an SEO booster. Of course, to properly handle this you need to combine it with conventional marketing techniques in order to make sure that crowd flowing in will in fact convert…

My time is limited these days so that’s why the short posts, however it will be concise but very interesting for the next few days, and maybe by the end of the week I’ll post the Complete SEO factors guide, but for that, you need to subscribe to my feed… PS: you can do it by email too, just click on the feed and select feedburner email subscription.