steveb - 8:37 pm on May 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

"No, Google is optimizing based on CHANGE which could either be creation or update."

Well obviously that is not true, and part of the point. Google does not crawl now based on change, specifically not based on a new page getting say 100 links when it is put online. Google crawls new pages pages promptly based on submission of that new page via sitemap or creation feeds. These creation methods offer no guidance at all on the value a domain puts on such page, let alone other domains.

A new page with three links to it and a new page with 1000 links to it are treated much too much the same by Google now. Instead of "discovery" via linking, which leads to original scores for the pages that are in the right ballpark, they discover pages via the quivalent of a press release. They add a page to the index with zero understanding of its proper score. They give weight to the domain the page is on, but all that does is create the three link versus 1000 link problem.

Google is not caring about change now. That is plainly clear. They are prioritized on new content that they are told about via notification tools. This leads to both inapproriate premature ranking and poor crawl priorities. And that doesn't even take into consideration that vast majority of these ping/creation pages are cruft that barely deserve to even be indexed in the first place. If the own domain of a page can't be bothered to link to it well, the rest of the world hardly needs to know about it.

"Don't confuse what's indexed and ranked in Google's pages by how frequently it's crawled."

You did that, not me. The ranking algorithm still is based more on linking rather than new-ness, but it's bungled up because the crawl is so weak. You can't rank properly if you are unaware of changes to existing pages because you are spending your time focusing on new pages. The creation of new pages offers no signal of quality; the opinion of older pages about new pages does that.

"If you have a page of merit that never changes, which is already indexed and ranked, why does it need to be crawled frequently? It doesn't."

This can sum up part of your mistaken notion. You can't rank new pages sensibly if you don't crawl old pages -- even if just to see that the new page is NOT linked by old pages.