Google Freshness Factor

Google Freshness factor:

In an attempt to rank web pages (are you sure?) based on how many times a page has changed or for that matter factoring in “what had changed or how much has changed” in its search algorithm is being filed in the US Trademark office by Monika Henzinger on July, 2005.

According to Monika, “last-modified-since” attribute of a page isn’t always correct to look at in an attempt to determine the freshness of that page, as most webmasters have figured out how to manipulate it. This isn’t news to me!!!!

Looking at the Patent filed with the Title - Information retrieval based on historical data, Google is ever evolving newer methods to rank pages.

To determine the freshness factor, this is what Google does according to the patent filed:

According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, a document’s inception date may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with that document.

According to one implementation, the inception date of a document may be determined from the date that search engine 125 first learns of or indexes the document. Search engine 125 may discover the document through crawling, submission of the document (or a representation/summary thereof) to search engine 125 from an “outside” source, a combination of crawl or submission-based indexing techniques, or in other ways. Alternatively, the inception date of a document may be determined from the date that search engine 125 first discovers a link to the document.

Now with this in place, webmasters in attempt to remain fresh, will add more content and will update it too often. Such webmasters should be advised against it as Google has factors in the application which when encountered with similar occurrences will consider it SPAM. Google will consider SPAM if ..

A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable. Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate spam.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Google News, SEO Tips. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.

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