If you regularly track your search results you’ve probably witnessed odd things happen to rankings for specific terms. One day you rank well for a term and the next the ranking all but disappears. Here is the reason why.
Search engines employ multiple algorithms to calculate which pages are returned and how they are ordered. Some of these algorithms such as PageRank are calculated prior to a query being made. Others, like Google’s Query Deserves Freshness (QDF), are calculated in real time. The results you see returned are weighted and ordered based on both pre-calculated values and real time values.
The purpose of Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) is to give fresh content a chance while maintaining the rankings of older high quality content that users interact well with. QDF is an algorithm that attempts to determine when fresh content should be served up and adjusts results accordingly while keeping results spam free.
QDF and Search Volume
Google introduced QDF to compensate for their heavy bias towards older well linked content which made it difficult for new content to rank. However, freshness alone is not enough, search volume also needs to show an upward trend. For example, another SARS outbreak would cause an upsurge in SARS related queries. Without QDF results for SARS related searches would be completely dominated by older established pages, while new information, presumably more relevant to current searchers, would get buried.
QDF also takes into account:
- News coverage
- Blog coverage
QDF, Blogs and News Coverage
QDF also analyses blog posts, news articles and Tweets etc. ensuring that information related to breaking news is given extra weight. By ranking news and hot topics quickly search becomes a ‘real time’ service.
So, if you are looking for something to write about make sure it’s fresh, breaking news within your industry for example. Try to get in early before others start blogging about it, tweet about it, bookmark it, link to it, update your xml and html sitemaps, and ping it through a service like pingomatic.com.
What to do Now
Canada’s Web Shop can help. We have an impressive record of delivering expert search engine optimization, web design and development.
[...] few months ago I wrote about Google’s QDF algorithm. QDF is an acronym for Query Deserves Freshness and it’s a method used by Google to provide fresh [...]