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Saved by 1 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-10-04


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on 2008-10-04 by suzannah

An interesting article that shows from a technical standpoint what Google determines to be "Fresh Content" and what Google considers to be stale content. My first thought is nonprofit Wiki. This is why the organiic, brainstorming, and constantly evolving nature of wikis, a trait shared with a nonprofit's issues or cause, could naturally bring a a site traffic. A nonprofit constantly documenting it's watchdog efforts will constantly be considered fresh content. Just another argument as to why nonprofits should absolutely be brining their conversations online.

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on 2008-10-14 by suzannah

Smarty, Ann. 2008. Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google. Blog. Search Engine Journal. October 8. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/stale-vs-fresh-document-as-defined-by-google/7755/.

Bill Slawski did a great job of summarizing the patent with help of two examples:

The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it’s not stale. A news article about the “World Series” from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for “World Series” this October.

Highlighted by suzannah

Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are “no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document“).

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The staleness of a document may be based on:

  • document creation date,
  • anchor growth, traffic,
  • content change,
  • forward/back link growth, etc.

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Google patent explains how they can spot the stale content using 4 factors:

  • Query-based factor;
  • Link-based criteria;
  • Traffic - based criteria;
  • User-behavior-based criteria.

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Stale content: 4 factors

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1. Query-based factor basically refers to analyzing which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Besides, the search engine tracks which queries one and the same document ranks for: “discordant set of queries” might mean the page is spammy.

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2. Link-based factor analyzes the page backlinks monitoring the dates that new links appear (i.e. “indexed by Google or the date the linking page was created”) to a document and that existing links disappear. By looking into the the rate at which links appear or disappear over time and how many links appear or disappear during a given time period, the search engine is able to conclude whether there is trend toward appearance of new links versus disappearance of existing links to the document or vice versa:

  • downward trend = > stale document (more links disappear than appear);
  • decrease in links = > stale content (either sudden or significant link disappearance).

Highlighted by suzannah

3. Traffic - based criteria: a large reduction in traffic may indicate that a document may be stale.

Highlighted by suzannah

on 2008-10-14 by suzannah

So if you have a great post that you want many users to get a chance to look at, consider a "top posts" category on your front page. This way, traffic will continue to go toward those posts.

4. User-behavior-based criteria: if people spend too little time on the page (compared with the similar / tightly relevant page), that might mean the document is stale.

Highlighted by suzannah

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