BEWARE:modified since headers affect google crawl more than sitemaps

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Chios, May 3, 2006.

  1. #1
    My site http://hausfay.com has numerous pages that have been cached june and july of 2005 even though they have changed a few times since then and google has passed by the main page many times since then (main page's cache has been a few days old)

    Google states somewhere in its guidelines for webmasters that it always keeps in its cache the last version of the page (last crawl). So that means that most of my pages have not been looked at since june/july 2005. The trouble here is that since then I have spend a lot of time trying to SEO these pages but google ignores them.

    I have also read (in the guidelines) that the server should support the if-modified-since header and have checked using the cacheability tool and it seems that my modified since header is not sent from my server at all. I think that is the problem. Any opinions on that ?

    On this matter:
    What is the deal with sitemaps, I have a sitemap.xml that says google should crawl weekly and that the pages have changed recently, I check that the sitemap is downloaded almost daily but still more than half of the pages have very old cache. In this respect I think sitemaps are useless.
     
    Chios, May 3, 2006 IP
  2. Pootwan

    Pootwan Active Member

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    In my experience the only fields in the sitemap.xml that G seems to take seriously are the url itself and the priority. The high priority pages really get spidered more than the low. But the date and the frequency change fields seem to have no impact.
     
    Pootwan, May 3, 2006 IP