Timely links appearing higher in Google rank

Cory Bergman January 1st, 2008

If you’ve noticed timely content like news stories and blog posts appearing higher in Google — even content that’s less than an hour old — you’re seeing Google’s recently-tweaked search algorithm at work. Google is indexing pages faster and giving an edge to freshly-published content. At the same time, established pages (like those from Wikipedia) appear to be suffering. Explains the GoogleSystem blog, “The problem is that you can’t rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks, so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.” Blogs have been taking advantage of the recent changes by carefully wording and optimizing their posts (something that most news sites have been doing for quite some time) as well as anticipating popular search terms based on current events.