We’re all familiar with Google’s traditional crawling method to index web pages in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. However, Google has announced that they are now using RSS and Atom feeds to discover new websites. This, in turn, allows Google to incorporate new content from a variety of sources as soon as it’s posted. While not exactly a “real-time” search, Google’s new method is undoubtedly faster than its traditional crawling method.
Google hasn’t made any statement about replacing traditional website crawling for sites that are feed-enabled—if they did, it would truly revolutionize search engine optimization (SEO). However, it’s likely that Google will opt for the quicker alternative in the future as it tries to catch up to the “real-time search” social media marketing platforms like Twitter have popularized. With this news out, search engine optimization (SEO) industry experts note that feed-enabled sites should use full feeds over partial feeds to get content indexed faster.
Google also announced a potential partnership with real-time protocol PubSubHubbub that provides users with nearly instantaneous announcements on site updates. The search engine king was mum on the details, but it’s just an indication that Google knows real-time search is crucial to their future. If they do utilize a tool like PubSubHubbub, their results would be updated in real-time—which would be an amazing feat from traditional web crawling. Yet, we can understand why they only mentioned it briefly. There is the issue about how to rank real-time results. While their algorithm awards sites with fresh, relevant content and plenty of traffic, it’s a whole other issue about doing it in real-time!
But, until they figure it out, search engine optimization (SEO) leaders agree that Google is going down the right path by offering a quicker alternative to having your content discovered.
Written by: Daisy K.