Optimization ideas to help your site rank higher on the back to the recent Google 'Freshness' Update

[SimpleSEOTips]

As a lot of you will be aware, Google introduced an algorithm update over the last two days which is set impact roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give users more up-to-date relevant results for varying degrees of freshness.

The long and short of it is that Google will be rewarding "fresh/new” content and offer this type of content with higher ranking within the search results.

The official Google blog post regarding the update can be found here: Official Google Blog: Giving you fresher, more recent search results

I was hoping to use this thread to discuss what tactics webmasters can use to benefit from this change.

To kick things off I have listed below a couple of links to some resources which are already offering advice to webmasters as to how they can take advantage of the Google Fresh update:

7 Content Marketing Tactics To Rank Higher In Google’s New Fresh Results- Marketing Pilgrim

Google's "Freshness" Update - Whiteboard Friday - SEOMOZ

Feel free to add your own thoughts, experiences, and other resources to this thread. The new change on first glance appears to be quite a significant one and therefore carries a lot of importance for SEOs.

[PhotogJohn]

Thanks for starting this thread. I am definitely looking for ways to keep Google happy.

[PhotogJohn]

What I am wondering is if this only impacts searches with current keywords. For example, would "history of the fall of Rome" be impacted? Or what about something like "acne treatment"?

[cooler1]

How does Google know if the fresh content is relevant? Does it do something like analyze the keywords on a sentence level to ensure the keywords are related to the topic?

[Domsa]

Originally Posted by PhotogJohn

What I am wondering is if this only impacts searches with current keywords. For example, would "history of the fall of Rome" be impacted? Or what about something like "acne treatment"?

I believe it will, to an extent. I don't think it will be affected as ''top 2011 videos'' or ''superbowl 2011'', but if the content is over 2 years old, I suggest adding something new, like an article or something. I don't really see what the big fuss is since 99.9% of IMers here deal with niches that don't focus on current events.