Hot or not? Does Google really use a new ranking algorithm?
Webmasters found
an anomaly in Google's ranking
results. Has Google changed its
algorithm to artificially increase
the ranking of new pages?
What has happened?
On 1 January, Google celebrated
25 years of TCP/IP (the Internet
protocol). A click on the
special Google logo that was
used on Google's home page
sent you to the search result
page for the term "
January
1, TCP/IP
".
The number of searches for
that term increased dramatically
on that day because the term
was linked through Google's
logo.
As a result, the term looked
like a hot topic and Google
decided to list more recent
pages in the search results.
Remarkably, the highly ranked
pages were mostly blog pages.
A search for "
January
1, TCP/IP
" used
to return a Wikipedia page
as the top result.
Has Google really changed
its ranking algorithm?
Google hasn't changed its
algorithm. Google shows more
recent results if a search
query that wasn't popular
before suddenly gets many
searches.
Google analyzes the search
volume and the blog post volume
to decide if a special search
term or topic is hot or not.
For example, if 100,000 people
search for "London" every
day then you'll get trusted
content from older websites
in the search results. If
1,000,000 people search for
London on a particular day,
something might have happened
and Google will list more
blog posts and news articles
in the search results to give
web surfers more relevant
results.
This behavior hasn't started
on 1 January 2008. The same
has happened with other search
terms before. For example,
the search results for the
term
"canoeist" included
more blog and news pages last
December when a canoeist who
went missing in 2001 turned
up in London.
Google even has a that
allows them to find out which
topics and search terms are
hot.
Is your website hot
or not?
Google only uses this special
algorithm for hot topics,
i.e. recent news or events.
If your search terms aren't
related to recent news, then
this has no effect on your
rankings.
If you want to benefit from
a hot topic, it can help to
create a blog post that deals
with the hot topic. However,
you won't get lasting high
results with that method.
This extra feature in Google's
ranking algorithm doesn't affect
most search terms. It only affects
news related search terms and
even then, the effect only lasts
for a few days.
If you want to see your website
in Google's regular top 10 results
then you have to optimize your
web pages for Google's ranking
algorithm. IBP's Top 10
and IBP's will help
you to do so.