Content ranking on Google Search might seem a little wacky these days. Older news articles sometimes will rank higher in search results than newer content, much higher than when originally published.

I noticed this in January and mentioned it to a Google media-relations person, then let go of the idea. That’s until a MediaPost colleague pointed to an article from The Guardian, a British publication, reported “news of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up.”

A Google search for ICE operations returned a flood of government press releases toward the top of search results, according to the The Guardian. That news occurred in November 2010, when Barack Obama was president.

The Guardian reported thousands of examples through 50 states, “making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago.”

As The Guardian points out, there are several ways to game Google, but this is not some nefarious action by a savvy SEO expert who is also a bad actor. I couldn’t duplicate from Southern California articles that are not current, The Guardian identified. 

“The explanation here is very straightforward: the website in question added an ‘archived content’ bar to many of its press releases from 2024 and before (on a variety of topics), which is why the dates were updated in Search, as they were on other search engines as well,” a Google spokesperson told MediaPost via email. “Our systems are not designed to boost a page’s ranking simply because a timestamp is updated, and when people do these searches on Google, they find a range of sources including recent news articles.”

Aimclear founder Marty Weintraub called it a *%#?$, a word I would rather not print, in an effort to preserve revenue for ads that might serve up online articles or press releases related to immigration.

Weintraub in a text message pointed to content that might have resurfaced after being de-ranked from a recent Google algorithm update. He does expect ranking outcomes to adjust in time.

There are countless reasons why older articles get indexed or reindexed in Google Search. The most common reasons are changes to the website page or external links to the page, changes in Google’s algorithms, or reindexing requests, said Robert Nance, founder of Push Marketing. 

“Google continually crawls the web, and if an older web page is refreshed or new backlinks are created, this can make the page more discoverable by Google,” Nance said. “Google releases major search updates three to five times a year on average. A recent update could have changed how Google’s algorithms evaluate articles, causing previously unindexed articles to show up in search results.”

Nance said website owners can use Google Search Console to submit sitemaps and request indexing for specific pages. If a webmaster submitted an older page, this could explain its appearance in search results.

Then there is the loss in traffic, when a publisher site loses traffic from Google Search to their website. News Corp Chief Financial Officer Lavanya Chandrashekar reported on its most recent earnings call that The Sun lost lost half of its traffic in part to algorithm updates at Google and Microsoft search. Chandrashekar pointed to “industry headwinds on search algorithms.” 

Not all websites are losing traffic, but it’s one casualty of an algorithm change. The New York Post also lost 27% of its traffic during the same time period, the company said. 

It’s not some nefarious, underhanded trick to float older content to the top of rankings. Some publisher sites are seeing a drop in traffic. Here’s what’s happening.