Marketing Pilgrim

If you haven’t heard about Google’s “Freshness Update” by now, I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it much more. The short story is that Google is now “Giving you fresher, more recent search results.“. Marketing Pilgrim took a look at this update as well. So what’s next?

Well, “new” content is now ranking higher for many searches.

Looking around at various search results across the board, some of the results are astounding. As Rand Fishkin pointed out, a Google query for “Top Chef Texas” is almost entirely composed of content that is just days old. Changing the number of results to 100 doesn’t help much, either.

So how do you leverage this? What can you do to try and ensure that you have a shot at “fresh” rankings?

If you have been following this saga for any time you may have wondered if the day that Groupon goes public would ever come. Well, unless something goes terribly awry, today is the day and there is plenty of interest in the IPO.

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports

Groupon has priced its public offering at $20 a share, several dollars above the expected price range of $16 to $18. That will garner $700 million for the start-up, which is only several years old, at a valuation of close to $13 billion.

The offering for the Chicago-based daily deals site — which has had a controversial IPO process — was well upward of 10 times oversubscribed, meaning there was a lot more demand than supply of its stock.

What would you rather have, a raise in salary or access to Facebook at work? How you answer that question is highly dependent on your age.

Cisco conducted a survey of 2,800 young professionals across fourteen countries and they came up with data that, while not unexpected, is still a little disturbing.

Part Two of the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report focused on social media, mobile technology and the workplace. Overall, they found that connecting to people on the internet was a big priority for the under 30 crowd, so much so, that they were willing to sacrifice financial stability in order to have access.

More than half of college students globally (56%) said that if they encountered a company that banned access to social media, they would either not accept a job offer or would join and find a way to circumvent corporate policy.

Yahoo has launched two new ad services designed to engage consumers in a more meaningful and fun way.

First is the Social Sentiment Slider. The slider is a sponsored poll that is attached to a piece of content on Yahoo’s site.

Here’s what it looks like:

We can’t see the article, but presumably it’s a news feature about the rise in luxury item sales, or something along those lines. People move the slider to express their opinion, the percentages change and then they can post that opinion directly to Facebook.

There’s no doubt that social engagement will help brand awareness, but there’s also a potential pitfall. The ad sponsor doesn’t get to choose the slider question, Yahoo does. In the above case, it can be disconcerting to see a high percentage to the negative side (Status) when you’re promoting a luxury car right underneath.

Google has announced an algorithmic change that is supposed to impact some 35% of searches. That’s a big number. The trouble is it’s going to be pretty hard to determine what 35% of searches that is. It’s like when I used to work in the insurance business. We would be trained to tell a prospect who was interested in life insurance that we knew exactly how many people would die each day, the problem was that we just didn’t know who (sign here Mr. Prospect). Now Google is telling publishers and their SEO’s to “sign here”.

In the Google blog post announcing his change we are told

Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

In light of yesterday’s app wreck we now must take new app announcements from Google with a grain of salt. Of course, since the one announced for Google Offers is an Android app one hopes the troubles will be few and far between.

We hear from Google’s Mobile blog

Today we’re announcing our new Google Offers mobile app, that allows you to discover, buy and redeem your favorite deals on the go. The free app will notify you about all the great Offers that match your interests. You can purchase offers in just a few clicks and even redeem paperlessly with select merchants.