June 25th Google Hangout - A little SEO nugget to consider

[JS_Harris]

In today's Google hangout video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_XYLwDTBKo) John Mueller mentioned something that could be considered a little SEO golden nugget.

At around 14:40 in the video John discusses the need for freshness if a topic becomes popular in the news. He describes how a page might be replaced in favor of a fresher article while the topic is popular but revert to an older more evergreen article when the popularity spike passes.

In trying to visualize what that would look like I see trusted news sites being able to outrank any other site for a trending topic but not to hold onto that ranking long-term. News site SEO is thus likely very different than traditional SEO, confirmed, and it implies some interesting possibilities.

[iamlost]

Not a new effect to those of us with evergreen info sites.

Whether it is a continuation of ye olde Query Deserves Freshness, first seen ~2007 and refreshed/updated several times since I don’t know but the correlation :) with trend/topic popularity upticks has been unmistakable.

And, knowledge that can be leveraged by evergreen info sites to some more or less degree. Especially given that most ‘news’ sites simply publish whatever they are given or what they copy/scrape from those already with the story.

A solid evergreen niche site already has the background no one in ‘news’ will bother with so depth is default. Often such a niche site has access to more detailed timely correct info as well. Regardless, the fresh news content is content icing to an existing content cake.

Plus, if it is a product, service fail/launch there are immediate marketing, public relations, linking opportunities with the major reporting sites and/or the company, government department at story’s heart.

Largely niche dependent as to frequency or likelihood of arbitrage but often well worth keeping an eye out for and jumping on ASAP.