Ah, he and I are no longer speaking after he told me to "read and learn" and I said some rather unsavory things to him in return. But perhaps he'll stumble across it on his own.
The friend of you was ( nearly) right. It really helps if you ftp the full website once a week. A smal problem - you must change most pages the changes must affect significant portion of the text. I have seen it on my website a couple a weeks ago. Modified text of most pages and got terrific new content boost and perfect SERPS that lasted for a week or so. Just pity that I do not have the time to rewrite the website once a week .
Urm... I think you may be wrong scisoft... Can you proove what you are saying or is it just a hunch... Seriously - it would be nice if it were that simple, but it isn't.
It's not so much FTPing, and it certainly doesn't affect PR (I think that 'friend' of Chiara mixed up PR and SERPs). But fresh content is by many recognised as having a positive effect on ranking. It makes sense to me but it can't be carrying an awful lot of weight because then a quality paper on, say E=MC2 that never changes would drop in ranking after a while. That'd be stupid in the light of providing relevant search results.
Well now seriously. The fresh content phenomenon is known to many SEOs. Some time ago I installed a program changing once a week certain words, links or sentences in several pages, but the boost was minimal, if any. But when I really rewritten a large portion of the text of many pages, the boost was very clear. Unfortunatelly, it did not survive longer than a week or so. The obvious question is how -deep is the Google cache and how many versions of the site you need to prepare. But I suspect that as soon as people start doing it, G will implement means to counteract, e.g. storing the page's checksum for a couple of years. As for the FTPing, I was joking. The means you have used for the fresh content installation to the server are absolutely irrelevant. But I speculate that this unhappy friend could actully see some good boost in SERPs, simply by placing new content on the server once or twise and not understanding the real reason for the oberved boost.
It would be interesting to know WHAT source he uses to formulate his opinion/s. Who knows, he might know more than any of us, but . . . . . . results are the best mesurement of success so let's see what his results will be at the end of the day.
I use a PHP script to load a random text testimonial onto my main page every time its loaded... It significantly increases the speed at which googlebot comes round again, but nothing noticable in the serps. I have toyed with the idea of creating a whole page that way, so that the page is constructed out of a range of preconstructed paragraphs, i.e choose 1 out of 10 opening paragraphs, 1 out of 10 second paragraphs etc. Sort of curious to see what a whole site built like that might do... sort of like a William S. Burroughs virtual cut-up but structured to make sense
in fear of sparking an out rage ...it takes me at least 29 hours to fully 'ftp' my site...so doing it everyday is gonna be a bit sticky.......hehe GEM
Wow Gem... You need to get broadband. And also have a serious look at the file sizes of the pages on your site.
50k!!!!! Wow... You should really look at that. Don't forget, that 50k is not taking into accout any images you have on the page. That really isn't good...
As soon as i finish doing the updates that are in progress right now,i need to add the sites that everyone has PM'ed me, and then I am going to dive in to learning CSS, which i know nothing about, and looks like a nightmare. If i can reduce the file sizes a bit then thats good, the difficulty comes with the fact that each advertiser can specify their unique Ad,to make it stand out..therefore each cell has its own font/colour/size etc etc....which i think is great for advertisers instead of the bland verdana text CSS Ads
IMO, I would just redo the whole lot... It may seem like a complete nightmare but in the long run, it would probabally work out a lot easier. CSS is really easy... It only takes a day or so to learn.
I agree with you, I might just do that, but it won't happen over night, I am learning all the time, I never would be putting Adsense on if i hadnt of come to this forum. The scale of the site makes it incredibly hard,,, eg: 1)Most site owners try to get links to their 40 pages..i have to worry about a lot more 2)Most sites are niche markets with easy keywords..i am stuck with property,cars,jobs etc....hehe 3)Most site owners can optimize pages individually.....yeah right that would take me 3 years at present. 4)I cannot just 'BLAG' content...i actually have to go get it i really would like to have another site on the go that i can 'play' with..i love your new site design btw...it makes me sooooo jealous..~damn~ GEM
Have you thought about using a pre made directory script to organise the results? It might make your life a lot easier.
I dont know a great deal about scripts etc...one day i am going to rebuild the whole lot to make it even easier to navigate. I am nearly finished building it..there is not actually much that i want to change.It is pretty easy to manage, i have a lot run on include pages, and once it is done then the only work i have is putting the content on... ...and thats the easy bit. (not) i dont know anything about directory scripts..if you post a link i will go lookie when i get back home later....thanks for your advice GEM
Well bro if I were you I would distance myself from that individual at the first available opportunity. Maybe give him the Google Page Rank white paper as a parting gift.
Sounds like it's about time you looked into some serious changes. If I'm understanding correctly you are actually manually changing all these pages!! Have you used any database/dynamic scripting at all?? I run a site with 100k+ pages and almost ALL of them are individually optimised. It is a breeze to maintain. All titles, descriptions, etc.. are dynamic. I change a bit of code on one page and it can immediately affect 25,000 dynamic pages and their rankings. That many pages gives you a HUGE range of keyphrases to target.. Each and every page is its own 'niche' topic if you like, so the excuse that you are 'stuck' with 'property, car, jobs' is really not valid. Quite simply, if you have a lot of pages, you MUST have a lot of individual keyphrases to target. And if you feel you aren't able to individually tweak them, then something needs serious fixing!