Freshness beats reputationfor hot topics?
Wasn’t sure if I wanted to get involved with this argument, but there are a couple of interesting factors worth watching.
Over the holidays, the unofficial Google blog, made a bold statement - Google ‘artificially’ promotes recent blog posts.
Not sure about ‘artificially’ as that would mean there’s a regular algorithm governed by some universal natural law. But the point was Google had started ignoring link data over freshness for hot topics.
Well yes, this is true but I’m with the camp that thinks this is old news. I’ve noticed this since universal launched. So why is it interesting? I’ve noticed that they’ve definitely turned this up a notch - and is certainly a little more than the fresh crawl rankings we’ve known about for a few years.
This does seem a little different and related to hot-trends. If Google sees a spike in search volume and a corresponding spike in online conversations - the fresh chatter gets a boost in rankings. There’s not enough time to calculate link data, though domain PR is likely to be factored as well as the freshness of the post.
In principle this seems like a positive move, as real-time context seem to override authority on old news. But this could be an open invitation to spam, as most people have pointed out.
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