Anyone involved with search engine marketing cannot have failed to notice the speed at which search engine rankings change these days.
The days of relative stability followed by big fluctuations after the infamous Google dance are long gone and the organic rankings are now in a state of everflux. In less than one hour, an earlier news article we wrote about ask.com was ranked top of Google in the organic results:
Of course, this is a fairly obscure search term and not one that we would boast about, but the fact that it is ranked organically after minutes rather than days indicates that the SERPS are extremely fresh.
Whilst Google Universal has not launched in the UK, the speed at which the article was ranking in the organic search results suggests that Google is already looking at its Google News content to populate search results.
At the time of writing, there is no cached version of the page and the Googlebot has not visited the page, so how can we be ranking in the top slot already? The page is currently ranking for several keyword searches relating to ask.com.
Whilst we do not expect this to last, it is an encouraging sign that fresh content is rewarded and we can expect search engine users to find it increasingly easy to find up to date content, which can only be a good thing. We will watch with interest to see whether this page will turn up in the SERPs for a search for ‘Is Google on speed?’…
***UPDATE*** -This article was posted at 6:09pm (UK time). -11 minutes later, it was showing on Google News. -A Google search for ‘is google on speed?’ then showed the page in position 4 (1.95million results) on UK only results and position 16 (16.3million results) on web results.