Are Your Pages Fresh?
Google is at it again filing for a new patent relating to a webpage’s freshness AKA FreshRank. For years people have been modifying their pages last modified date hoping that it might trick the search engines into ranking their sites better. With the documentation of this patent with the USTPO we can now see what in Google’s eyes makes a page fresh.
Document freshness can be defined as a combination of elements, such as:
- The frequency of all web page changes (last-modified-since)
- The actual amount of the change to a page itself; whether it is a structural change, or simple, but irrelevant, changes
- Changes in keyword distribution or density
- The actual number of new inbound links
- The change or update of anchor text
- The number of other pages in the database that relate to the same keywords
- The amount of duplicate content out there
- The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many outbound links on one web page, or linking to link farms or free for all pages)
Conclusion:
FreshRank is not your most important thing to worry about. While it is good to know, I would still spend the majority of my time building quality links to my pages.