Crawl dates importance

Hello,
last post at Matt Cutts blog shown how crawl dates do not effectively update everytime a crawler visits your page. In fact, this date gets updated when the crawler finds new content on your page.

Now I am asking myself: is it important to keep the page changing everytime even if there is nothing really new, just to keep crawlers attention up? Could it affect indexing and SERPS in any way?

For instance, you could simply change a copyright notice or some punctuation to have an update of your crawl date, I suppose. I am asking myself if this is good for your site, and if such behaviour is "ethical" towards the search engines

Thank you for your contribution!

Falco85

 

I've seen sites that haven't updated for a long time ( mainly history related stuff ) that still rank well, and I've also seen pages that change almost daily, and still manage to rank well for certain keywords..
And changing a little footer note to make crawlers believe your site has been updated is surely unethical.. though I'm not sure if crawlers are that stupid

 

It is not unethical. It's your web page, you can do whatever you want to it.

 

Build it for the users. Users like random content too, you know. Pages get boring if its the same joke every time.

 

Quality links are key if you want to rank well at google. I'm still wondering how to get them cheaply

 

I might set up my own link trading site. But! Only for PR4 links and higher. What do you think??

Col

 

I guess it's just a waste of time to think all day long what the spiders will think... Focus on your users. You get more points for that.

More than that- If you really want to add more content, just add more content to the page. Do it just for your users and than the SE will give you more credit.