The Query Deserves Freshness or QDF algorithm is a useful way to implement SEO for both new and old sites, by taking advantage of current events and news stories. QDF first came up as a response to an issue after Google finance would not rank for its own name. Page freshness has always been an area Google have paid close attention to, as they tend to show more respect to older content within a site, since the old pages of worth tend to attract others to link to them.
In the last part of 2006, one of Google’s goals was to try to find a way of showing new content for some of the more major search terms, whilst still also keeping the highest competitive keywords free from spam. The big question was whether it was better to provide extra respect for pages that had matured or newer content which was up to date and perhaps had perhaps more relevancy. Google has always tried to make sure that quality search results rank highly, and changing the algorithm to simply rank newer pages higher was not the answer, as results would leave out older pages which held useful information and authority.
The solution of Query Deserves Freshness means that search results depend on how popular and topical a search term is at that moment. The model decides this by examining other search queries, how much and how recently a subject has been written about. News headlines were previously included in some search results, but QDF can decide whether a specific query deserves higher ranking for recent news stories based on its current popularity status.
What does Query Deserves Freshness take into account?
- Blog coverage
- Overall volume of search
- News coverage
- Toolbar data (in some cases)
Google’s patent provides a section on methods they involve to gather this data including a sampling technique which gives them access to gather accurate information without having to look though many logs of any particular query.
QDF has gained major interest in the past few years as it provides another way of driving extra traffic into a website. For new sites, this brings a fantastic opportunity of outdoing the Google trust and getting new information to rank far quicker than normal. When using a QDF file, it is important to release your breaking news content as quickly as possible, as traffic searching for such a ‘hot’ subject will be produced in a very short space of time.
