Handy new SEO toy

The toy is named ReDate, and that's it in a nutshell.

Give it your home directory on your server and it will find all physical .htm, .html, and .shtml files and "touch" each, which updates the date/time ("last modified") stamp to the then-current instant. It will handle all files in all sites that share a common server parent directory.

You can also, in the customization file, specify any number of directories from which you might want the toy excluded.

The toy comes with a file intended to be run as a cron job, so you can freshen your files' datestamp daily.

Obviously, it behooves you to actually have some fresh content on each page, but if you supply that fresh content by way of files "included" in any way, as by SSI in .shtml files, the actual page's date/time stamp is not affected. Using ReDate, you can be sure the 'bots know your pages have freshness.

A little thing, but, I hope, a potentially useful one. Free, of course.

You can find it on my SEO Tools, Toys, and Packages Site as ReDate .

(I am hoping, in the not-too-distant future, as time allows, to build a toy that will allow you to ssi-drop-in some small, site-neutral tag of your choosing that will change minutely every day, so pages will always be truly different in byte count and content from day to day.)

 

Owl, would this be beneficial to someone who does not update their content daily?

What I mean by benefit is toward the SERP's...

 

Between the time I posted the message and now, I have released another tool that, if deployed, renders the question moot.

It is a page dropin that, in my opinion, can be added to any page whatever. For a sample of what it provides, look here (and reload the page a few times). I myself reckon that would go anywhere (and you can make it whatever size, color, location, etc. that you want--your page's style controls it).

But answering the original question--I cannot say for sure, and I suspect that no one not on the Google payroll can either. I don't see how it can hurt, in that people often make small changes to a file, then change their mind, but save the changed/changed-back version, so it is perfectly legitimate to have an unchanged page with a newer stamp.

I don't think it would help much either if there is no content change whatever, but the main use of the thing is for pages that change "their" content by way of SSI includes or directives (e.g. "last modified" date), because the main file's date/time stamp--what the bots would see--is not changed by changes in the included files.

But I really, really like the new toy, for which fuller info is on my site at the "Know" toy.