Google likes updated content!

I'm with you here. My site gets hit every day by Google, and deep crawls are at least every other day. As of today GoogleBot has cached 50k pages this month, and I haven't updated my index in a LONG time.

DS

 

I'll have to remember that.

 

Providing fresh content not only keeps the bots happy, but it keeps your human visitors happy, and provides others webmasters with greater incentive to link to you.

 

There are numerous automated ways to assure that some or all of the pages of your sites always have fresh content. I have several little tools and toys designed for that purpose available free at the SEO Tools Toys, and Packages site. You can, for example, put a "current weather" dropin (for virtually any location in the world) on, or an international currency-exchange-rates mini-table, or even just a little teaser tag ("What do you know about X?", where X varies at every page presentation and links to an online encyclopedia artice on X). All are highly customizeable.

 

Very Interesting Stuff. I will most certainly look at this site.

I am of the mindset to deep link to every important page on your site. This way, whether you have changing content or not, you are getting visited to these deeper pages for both SEO and quick updates when content changes. IMHO the more important the page, the more deep links I would place to it.

I would also disagree as the importance of content changing to G outside of indexing. Very important if applicable to Visitors getting up to date information.

If your site is about "Selling Widgets" and you widgets market doesn't change, and you're getting top ranks, why would you change your widget site content? Why should you have to? Just doesn't fit to imply ranking is helped by frequent content changes. I think its the content that you update that helps your ranking rather than "Just any update".

I can point to one competitor site that is content only with call to action to an application. I monitor and attempted to "mimick" weight factors, and this site has been top forever. Doesn't change content, yet maintains top spots for any industry related KW I have found.. No matter what freakin KW always in top ten...Heck of an SEO job if you ask me!

 

Fresh content scores all the way round - search spiders, other site webmasters for linking and most important your clients like fresh content and they bookmark you!

 

I don't think fresh content is the only parameter in this equation. It's also about PR. It's well known that pr 5 pages are crawled daily, or every 2 days, while pages with less pr are crawled less often and so on.
Although new fresh content on the home page may tell the bot to crawl "deeper", believing there is more fresh content to be indexed, but it doesn't tell the bot to crawl "more often".
This is just my opinion on this one

 

It may be "well known", but to whom? Not to me, and, apparently, not to Google. I have numerous PR-5 pages that seem to get crawled about weekly.

 

I'm with Owlcroft on this one.

My PR2 site gets crawled once to twice a day.

 

wow...I will update my whole site today! THanks for the info guys!

 

My homepage is updated everyday, and Google often deepcrawls me... It also helps to have a sitemap where all those pages are added (if you have a small website).

In my case I just have the links for the categories in the sitemap and the links for the articles in the homepage.

If you have a website that isn't updated Googlebot crawls will be slower... I've been deep crawled a week ago, and yesterday I was again....

 

Are you sure about this?

 

In my experience this has always been true.

 

That Google comes back more often when content is changed is the prevailing theory - and it makes perfect sense from an engineering standpoint.

As Google has limited resources to spider X sites per day, it's better for them to spider those sites that are more prone to change.

The same can be said about any site, using a retail analogy: If you operate a clothing store, and change your inventory frequently, customers are more likely to stop in to see what you've got. If you're inventory changes rarely, customers have less incentive to browse to see what's new – ‘cause little has changed since their last visit.

Google works the same way.

 

Yes, Google crawls updated sites faster.

 

Does anyone know how Google knows that you have updated your site? Why would it visit your site just because you've updated it?

Does Google perhaps look at the history of its own visits to your site and check/reindex your site more frequently if you display a pattern of content changes? Could it have to do with an increase in number of backlinks to your site that Google is discovering as it indexes other sites? Or what?