I read on someone's blog that showing the current date/time on your page helps with SERP's... the idea being that each time the page is crawled, it's slightly different, and this helps for "freshness". Anyone have feedback/criticism about this approach? LC
This won't help your serps. If you update the page with latest news snippets and fresh content on a regular basis then this will help.
I always put a live date and time which changes on my sites, if anything it might make search engines come back a small %'age more often but it wont help you in the serps. The space could be better used as mad4 mentioned for a auto updating news section or something that adds a little more relevant into to your site.
At least it helps you when you check the cache - it shows you when they last fetched a copy or at least one they decided to use.
I hate it when sites say "This site was last updated on Feb 23rd 2006", just looks like the internet of 1999. Far better to show news or something with a release date or blogs with dates on to show that the site is updated on a regular basis. This is very important on ecommerce sites as it helps build the trust of the visitor and gives the impression that the site is current and that there will be somebody at the other end to process your order.
I just show the date in the footer, nothing more. Still haven't had time to get a good RSS aggregator together.
Ok, glad I asked. I agree with mad4 ... having the date on the page looks a bit childish, like what I'm going to check that website to find out what today's date is? LOL Anyways, so long as its of no SEO value, I'll fuggetaboutit. LC
What about a "hit" meter like StatCounter? Its numbers change continually on the website's pages. Would search engines count that as "fresh" content, or are the search engines programmed to ignore hit counters as far as it being fresh content?
6-10 digits in relation to the rest of the page can hardly be called content now can it? My money is on Google ignoring it.
So does anyone have an idea of how much has to be added to a page for it to be considered updated content? Also, does deleting content from a page count as updated content and would it be positive or negative?
Plus, ususally the counter graphic is served from a different domain. It might help the hit counter's site, but not yours
I'm sure that the SE's data about each indexed page includes an update frequency and "delta" rate... i.e. what portion of the page was changed since the last index. This would enable them to categorize pages as regularly updating (like a blog or news page) vs. ones that are only updated irregularly or incrementally. That said, I don't think adding/deleting content is the thing, it's what % of the indexable content changed vs. the last crawl, and how often is it changing. Based on comments here (and I suppose common sense), it sounds like the threshold for "meaningful change" is probably well above that which a simple date change would cross. LC
Counters and date/time stamps don't help in any way for your search engine rankings. Altering your content in a real way rather than thinking of shortcuts is the only way to do it.
If you can use mod_rewrite for autogenerated urls like this http://www.yoursite.com/content/i-love-google-03162006.html Then, yes, it will help, thats my opinion.
Thanks for all the replies. I would still like to know if deleting content from a page counts as updated content and would it be positive or negative? For example, if one deletes a couple of paragraphs from a page, without replacing, is that considered negative?
If you are deleting content you should really add some new content to replace it. For example if you have the top 5 new products on your site and remove the oldest one when you add a new one. Or if you have the latest news from your niche and you limit it to 3 stories.
Thanks Mad4... but sometimes when revising a page, I decide to remove a sentence or a paragraph or 2, without necessarily replacing. I never know if that affects my site's ratings!