Google's freshness update

Query deserves freshness

Today Google released the freshness update. What is it? Ill try to explain. Google Caffeine was a update from last year that enabled Google to update their index in chucks instead of updating the whole index each month or so, results show that Bing does something simular. Search results include results for many reasons one of them is QDF, query deserves freshness, This means that while there may be 100 good authoritative results to display, yours may be included because is has fresh content and you may get on the first page because Google wants some fresh results as well as the high authoritative results.

This is good right?

Google has now stepped up QDF for certain queries, about 35% of queries in fact. These queries include results to do with subjects where the user needs or wants the latest news, such as sports results, correct news stories, celebrity gossip. Last week i went and saw the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh here in Perth, on her Australian visit. If I had that sort of blog i could of blogged about it, it may of been of value to people wanting to know about here visit, but a few week later it would probably be of less importance. So Google will try to index data that is of this nature faster and give it better rankings for while it is relevant.

It is believed that this will rely on well maintained sitemaps, so if you want to get and advantage out of this update you should keep your sitemap updated, including last modified date and time.

This is good right, or is it?

Well it is good if you are included in these fresh results, at least for while your content is relevant and fresh, but what if it isn't, what if your writing of more timeless content, there is only so much room on the first page, if there is going to be more fresh content, there is going to be less timeless content. What about indexing, have Google invested in more infrastructure for this? Or does this mean certain content will get indexed more often at the expense of your content?