Amazon Grocery Post Rank on Google

I've noticed since their last update, Google seems to be giving tremendous weight to how current a blog post is. I noticed primarily because my post about Amazon Grocery last week was at the top of Google ranks for a day, and I saw about 50 visitors on the phrases Amazon grocery and Amazon groceries in my stats. The next day the page had slipped below the fold on the Google placement for these phrases and drew less than a dozen visitors. By the weekend, the original post was down in the second page of Google results.

I've got mixed feeling about a search engine giving freshness so great a weight in their ranking scheme. The problem is that there are plenty of people using automated means to produce thousands of posts per day with scraped results, and even though Google is using their PageRank algo as well, it stands to reason that recency as a value would tilt things a bit in favor of the scrapers. In the meantime, I have to admit that I haven't purchased anything from Amazon Grocery yet, I'm trying to cut back on coffee and popcorn.

Another sign that Google is ranking pages differently is the appearance of many Amazon pages for books with low Amazon ranks near the top of the Google search results. That may be due to Amazon scrapers with backlinks to Amazon giving some of those pages a high recency value in the search engine algo. In the old days, it was the books on Amazon that sold the best which ended up with the best Google ranks due to many Amazon Associates including these books on their sites. Well, life is change, an I suspect they'll get it right sooner rather than later:-)