The current popularity of Twitter and the fact that Twitter are trying to turn them selves into a real time search engine has made Google stand up and react.

Although we all know that fresh unique content was always essential to build power and authority on your site and also give your new post a freshness boost, there has been a slight tweak in the algo from what I am seeing over the last few days to give further power to fresh posts from authority and powerful sites.

What seems to be happening is that when a new post is created it gets indexed and then placed into a Top 10 position for some highly competitive terms, this ten over the next few days drops off on to page two, three and then eventually disappears from the SERPs.

It seems as though Google have increased the algothirm to bring in fresh results a lot more. Again this is great for that extra little bit of exposure.

A great example of this is the term “SEO”. Firstly it was Dave Naylor’s post about geo targeting which came straight into the Top 10 and then slowly faded out as the post aged and then the Search engine journal post which hit the first page and then slowly started shifting out.

I have also seen this occur on numerous other search terms

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After months of development and months of closed Beta testing, we are delighted to announce the launch of Articleranks.com in public Beta.

The site basically has two main functions the first allows Webmasters to feed in unique free content to their site. The second is more targetted towards article marketers and SEOs.

All of the major search engines love content, this is a proven fact and one of the best ways to actually get visitors to your site is via articles. Not only do they give you great click throughs, they also increase brand exposure and more importantly if done correctly it is one of the best methods to increase search positions.

But the thing is for so long people have been writing great content and having nowhere to submit it too except article directories which are off topic and full of spam.

ArticleRanks is set to revolutionise all of this by allowing people to actually submit their articles on REAL blogs and sites that people read. The best thing about it all is that you get great clickthroughs and you are getting links that the search engines will love why? I can tell you EXACTLY why, you are creating useful content which is then distributed to real webmasters that want to receive it. This is the end of approaching webmaster asking them if they would like to host your article.

Just imagine writing an article and getting it automatically drip fed into a huge numbers of top ranked blogs on different IPs, even better, each article will be unique in its own right with a link back to your site. Your rankings are simply going to shoot through the roof.

The service is absolutley FREE to use, but there is also a monthly plan and the option to buy credits. The site also has the following functions:

As a gift for all the SEOTops loyal readers, please enter this coupon when signing up 5186e8988585703797cba7173b1a2dca This will give you free credits in your account that you can use for publishing.

Remember there are three ways that you can gain access to publishing articles and getting themed links.

1) The FREE way. Add your sites to the system and earn credits for each article that gets published on your site, which can then be exhanged to allow you to publish articles.

2) Buy individual credits, this is great if you are only planning to use the system say once a month

3) Upgrade your account to monthly subscription, pay a small fee and have unlimited publishing access.

P.S. The system is still in Beta and may have a few glitches therefore it would be great if you could use the form on the site to report any.

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Since the brand update was released by Google there has been numerous SEOs asking “How they infact determine a brand”. There have been a huge amount of suggestions by various big name SEOs and other industry experts such as the following:

1) Looking at analytics data

2) Looking at offline activity

3) People searching for the brand domain

While all these may play a major part, I have been undecisive at why brands actually deserve to be ranking for highly competitive words if they are not making the effort until now. After checking and analysing most of the current results, it actually could be a great update for the search industry. The reason I say this is as follows.

For so long Google have been giving so much power to links and anchor text and although they still do, this brand update could in my opinion be introducing “brand citation” a lot more. Lets think of it this way,  to have a brand, you have to have a lot of buzz surrounding that thing. As an example lets take Ford who have recently got a major boost in all of their positions. How many citations of ford do you think there are around the whole internet? Would the majority of people actually talking about Ford link back to them? A high percentage would not, lets just say someone wrote a blog post or a news story such as the BBC and it read as follows.

“Ford have released a new model of the highly succesful Mondeo car, this new car is set to introduce a new era of driving”.

Now thinking about it a huge amount of sites would actually do something like this, then if on the other hand you had Mr Smiths car related site called mrsmithautos.com as an example, that has great content and a great structure but has actually gone out and got himself lots of great backlinks with perfect targetted anchor text, in Googles eyes this is a lot less natural then people actually talking about his site. And in most occasions Mr Smiths site will not have any REAL citations such as “mrsmithautos are releasing a new innovative approach to selling cars online”.

But with the ford sentence above, Google have the processing power to analyse and understand all the content around the Brand, so they know that in high probability that the person is talking about the Brand ford and the site gets a boost for the keywords around it. Again as Matt Cutts indicated the higher the PR and relevancy of the site referencing the brand name, the more power will be passed through.

Its the same if you look at another brand Autotrader, there are a huge amount of people that write personal blog posts such as “I just purchased a great second hand BMW for Autotrader, it only cost me £1000″. Just because that term is not linked why should Autotrader not get any benefits from it? We all know that with the rise in popularity of social media sites such as Twitter a vast amount of people are going to be citing brands.

In my opinion Google from what it seems could be actually analysing content and references a lot more, its the perfect solution ifyou have a brand people are going to talk about it in general sentence not just link to it and this is what Google may now well be analysing and it could be the reason as to why some of the results are slightly out of shape as they further tweak the algo to get this right.

Just my two cents, to create a brand you need to have something good to offer and great content so people discuss your site a lot more.

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