Most people Google to find products they are looking for, and Google’s pushes fresh content, only those businesses with new content make the cut to get on the first page. This becomes a real challenge for some really high quality but small businesses out there. Big companies know all about managing search engine optimization; they have the staff to deal with and get the company noticed. However, small business search engine optimization has become an even greater challenge with the latest updates to Google’s search algorithms.

In 2010, Google released an update dubbed “Caffeine” which sought to deliver faster and more accurate results from the increasingly complex and demanding search environment. While technically providing faster, more comprehensive, and more accurate results, the indexing system had little effect on small business search optimization.


The latest update, however, may prove to be a bit more of a challenge. The goal of this ranking update is to provide fresher content on time-sensitive topics. The search algorithm is supposed to be designed to differentiate between content that needs to be as fresh as possible, and content that is less time-sensitive. Google says this “fresh” content algorithm will affect approximately 35% of searches. Under the new update, a person searching “Olympics” will be given results for the Olympics that are right around the corner, not those from 50 years ago. Content may be only minutes old, and will be listed in order of occurrence.


While all businesses need to be aware of the effect of “fresh” results on small business search engine optimization, it would appear that businesses dealing with rapidly changing technology would be the most affected by the change. Big businesses have more financial leverage and staff to be able to get content out in the front pages of search results. Small businesses need to be aware of the trend and find efficient means of getting fresh content so that they can be front-page news as well.