The Google Freshness Factor
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There is a patent application in the US Trademark Office from Monika Henzinger, published in July, 2005, that certifies that she has figured out a way of determining a document’s “freshness.” In an attempt to associate this new term with Google’s other patented terminology (namely PageRank and TrustRank), forum posters are now referring to the concept as “FreshRank.”

The abstract of this patent application states that one of the problems of determining the freshness of a document indexed in a search engine is that the “last-modified-since” attribute isn’t always correct. Some webmasters have figured out they can change the modify date, but obviously a pattern of abuse developed. It doesn’t fool Google, because what Google looks for is actual modified content. As far as how Google determines how old or “fresh” a document may be is still somewhat of a secret. Lately, in the estimation of many, Google has done a very poor job in determining which web sites present as the freshest content in relation to relevancy.

This brings to mind a pertinent question. How does the freshness factor rank in determining relevancy? It has been determined by some that it doesn’t necessarily matter how fresh a document is to Google, especially if that document has many inbound links pointing to it. Henzinger is attempting to patent a more explicit form of freshness, since not all search engines use the “last modified since” attribute anyways, and stating that search engines need a more reliable way of determining overall updated content.

Unfortunately, with the implementation of the duplicate content penalty, we’ve been seeing problems with the freshness attribute of documents. With Google, in particular, the filter employed to whittle out duplicate content doesn’t appear to be taking into consideration the actual origin of the content. For many, this is becoming a great frustrating point. With the onslaught of the technological advances that Google has placed into the public realm within the last decade, it seems impractical and almost ridiculous that they would leave out the very concept of being able to determine the source of the fresh content. Yahoo and MSN do not appear to have this particular problem, so why does Google?

Next: Google's Removal Tool and Duplicate Content >>
 

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