How do I make googlebot visit my homepage everyday? I don't care about other pages - there are 3000+ and Googlebot can take it's own sweet time to crawl those pages but the front page - I would definitely want it to visit once a day. Any pointers in my sitemap update?
Crawl rate is a direct function of the PR of your pages. Get more high PR (and high quality) links and you get crawled more. Google Sitemaps allows you to increase the crawl rate as well.
mad4's hit part of the equation but there's a bit more to it. the page needs to be changed often. if it's static, why would google bother to visit it every day? if it's not dynamic, you have another option: have content constantly added. the only way to have a lot of content constantly added is through some sort of user contribution system-- may be a forum, may be that you allow users to submit content, etc. why do you need it to visit everyday, anyway?
Yes, I think I remember hearing that a PR of ~5 will have the spider visiting every 2 days or so... (that is of course, that the content is changing regularly)
Quite right disgust. If Google visits your page and finds its not changed since the last visit then it will decrease the crawl frequency. If the content has changed then it will increase the crawl frequency.
I think, now google is providing a new function in the Google Sitemap, where one can adjust the crawl rate to highest, normal & lowest. Do chack that out by logging into Google Sitemap services.
Need it to visit everyday - it's article site - I get 100's everyday but I approve only about 25-30 so they stay on first page. So 30 articles on front page needs to be crawled and when the bot visits next day - there are 30 new articles - the previous links are now gone.
The sitemaps option is more about how hard it hits rather than how often it hits. with higher pagerank they'll get crawled anyway. I'd try an "archive" style index of your articles, a la vbulletin.
Hmm so now it's about waiting and getting PR!!! Well then not much I can do there. Thanks for the responses guys!
You should make sure that your articles link back to your front page. (as your articles may get linked from other sources) If you are interested in knowing how your entire website distributes "link power" within your website, you may be interested in *cough* my website analyzer software Still, under all circumstances, backlinks from other websites are #1 thing.
it does not have to do with your visible PR, it has to do with your internal google PR, which is updated much, much more frequently... just because you can't see the PR doesn't mean you don't have it.
Internal PR - hmmm - so far I can conclude that I really haven't received any pointers on how to invite Gbot everyday
getting more inbound links, and links from pages with high PR, will increase your PR. it'll first increase it internally (and it will be invisible), but it'll later be visible on the toolbar.
If you have installed Google toolbar you can see your visible GooglePR. However, that "public" visible value is not updated very often.
I find that even with an active forum included on one of my sites, that the googlebot only visits every three to four days. I am leaning toward the thought that html pages get updated faster than forum pages, but I may not be correct about that.