The Google Freshness Factor - D'oh! Google Bungles the Content
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Well, this is all very interesting, you say, but what has this all have to do with the Freshness Factor? That’s a good question, and one I’ll answer now. So consider those pages that have been filtered out, but then reappear after the removal waiting period, with obsolete, stale content. If the webmaster felt that the pages needed to be removed in the first place, chances are good that the content isn’t very fresh. Throw in the dead links, and you truly have stale content.
The problem here is that even though these are obviously dead pages, with dead navigation, they still show up in the index, and many times ranked higher than pages with current and fresh content. This appears to me as a major problem. So, with outdated content placed in with what could be considered fresh and relevant results, is the Google Freshness Factor disappearing? Not only in light of these pages, but coupled with the content that has been whittled out due to the duplicate content filter, when the results that remain are not even the original source of the content, surely we aren’t imagining things here?
But consider this: some websites don’t need to be updated. Does this mean they aren’t fresh? Not likely. Think for a moment about that government bill that was put into action 10 years ago. No new fresh content there. What about the scientific formula for penicillin? I don’t think that changes much. And what about the historical account of the Trojan War? Pretty much stays the same. Most businesses adopt terms and conditions or a privacy policy that is designed to stay the same.
There is no mention in the patent application of gauging whether the page continues to be a currently relevant citation, even if it is not all that important as to whether a page itself updates regularly. Even Google mentions how fresh a website’s content is as a problem in one of its own recent patent applications. What does Freshness actually mean? Is it really a question of a document’s freshness or is it more about its relevancy?
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