Honestly, I love Google — but it isn’t perfect. I do get a chuckle when discover their imperfections prevent searchers from finding Google’s own sites!
Now, we all know every business with a new web site has been grousing about the “freshness” issue with Google. Web site developers often find that no matter how great their new site is, Google won’t send anyone their way: the double whammy of having no backlinks and being new causes Google to rank it poorly.
The reasons for this is Google traditionally favored older web sites to newer web sites. They did this because, frankly, there is no doubt that many new sites are nothing more than spammy pages set up to gain SEO.
We all know those sites never contain relevant content.
Still, some new sites are wonderful and full of relevant information. Heck, Google itself sets up new sites! So, what happens when Google works hard and creates a new site?
From the New York Times, we learn:
When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for “Google Finance” couldn’t find it.
Obviously, everyone knows that a searcher entering “Google Finance” at Google wants to find “Google Finance”, not some article that happens to use both the words Google and Finance. Just as obviously, Google wants people to find Google’s own pages. Even more obviously, Google’s profitability depends on people finding what they are looking for- which in this case is “Google Finance”.
So, this is a bad triple whammy for Google! Google decided that maybe they ought to fix it. Since Google is Google, they didn’t have to “fix” their problem by buying ads and links — they decided to tweak the ranking algorithm.
Google is justifiably secretive about its ranking schemes, so the NYTimes article doesn’t tells us exactly what Google came up with. However, it evidently involves developing a mathematical formula to determine the probability that a user wants “fresh” information. Google’s “judgment” will rely on sudden increases in the number of searches entered for specific terms, and the number of new articles involving the search terms. After all, both explode when important news hits the world!
Google is now developing and testing their new algorithm. If it works, maybe it will help those bringing new businesses online. Let’s hope so!
It’s always nice if you’re able to tweak your system to favor your own properties. But, it’s funny how although this article is almost 4 years old… Google is still dealing with sites spamming the web.