Frequency of updates?

maybe Google wants new content?

[gators]

Has anyone taken into consideration that possibily part of
the key to a ranking in Google is now frequency of updates? Consider that perhaps, in addition to the spam, Google wants to eliminate stale, abandoned websites.

That may be one reason that some 'worthless' directory information is playing such a high ranking for some search terms. That is because the directories are updated a lot!

One of my sites had completely fallen from the rankings for one of its two keyword phrases. I was avoiding changing the site too much until we figured out more.

But I wanted to see how quick it would take Google to update the page.

So I did just a very simple, modification of the index.html page. So simple. I just changed one word on the whole page - in the title.

I made that change on December 15th.

Well, I just did a two keyword search and that site is now on bottom of page 1 - with an updated page date of Dec. 15th and its cache is showing my recent modification.

That may be why some webmasters have done major or minor so-called de-optimizations for their site and are showing results.

Maybe it is not necessarily the de-optimization or changes per se, but the fact that the page was UPDATED and is no longer stale .

Any thoughts?

I know this would not be exclusively what Google is up to - but it could be part of it.

[superscript]

Hi Gators, it's possible, but many commerce sites are constantly changing (new products, new prices, special deals), but have still been hit hard. My non-commercial site is just a huge load of static text that hasn't been modified for months, but is doing fine. You may be seeing something akin to a freshbot effect.

[John_Caius]

If it's got an updated page date then that's a freshbot effect - also see "fresh tags".

[rfgdxm1]

>Has anyone taken into consideration that possibily part of
the key to a ranking in Google is now frequency of updates? Consider that perhaps, in addition to the spam, Google wants to eliminate stale, abandoned websites.

Problem with that idea is that for many info searches, stale old sites are very useful. If the search is on "Peloponessian War", a good site that hasn't been updated in years is still quite relevant. The collateral damage of such an algo tweak would be considerable.

[Jeff_H]

rfgdxm1, you read my mind.

Older, text-only, informational sites are often more useful, especially for research, because back in the day, people made content-driven sites. Site content was not determined by advertisers as it very often is now.

[rfgdxm1]

>Older, text-only, informational sites are often more useful, especially for research, because back in the day, people made content-driven sites. Site content was not determined by advertisers as it very often is now.

Yep. It also occurs to me that somebody would keep a stale site online for years may indicate that they believe that it is useful. If it was only rarely visited, they'd likely drop it in the bit bucket. Particularly if they are paying for a domain name and hosting.