Never receive fresh tags

[dawlish]

I have a site which has been operating for around 3 years but for the last 12 months it has never received any fresh date tags despite the content updating daily and a PR of 6.

The time from which it stopped receiving fresh tags coincided with the start of peculiar behaviour. This being the position the site appears in the search results fluctuating considerably from minute to minute. At one time it can be on page 1 for a query, yet 15 minutes or so later for the same query it can be on page 3 or 4, another time during the day it will be on page 2,3,4 5, or sometimes 6. This has been happening for over 12 months now, yet other sites listed for the same query seem to be quite static, or at least some move up and down 1 or 2 positions rather than 2 or 3 pages.

Is anyone else experiencing similar behaviour? Can anyone offer any explanation for the lack of fresh tags / results differences, are they linked?

[gardener]

I have a similar site - good content, updated frequently, never any fresh tags. (but yet on page one of the SERPS)
Furthermore, within the last month or so, the time between caching is getting longer and longer. Used to be several days at most, now it's more like several weeks.

[Marcia]

For one, do a search on "last-modified" you're liable to find something helpful.

I'm not sure just changes on the page is enough in some cases. I've got a dead_in_the_water site that's been sitting there dormant, untouched since before the first of the year. It was never even really finished - PR nothing to speak of (4 on the homepage), virtually no backlinks, no fresh tags, nothing. I started working on updating and finishing it up a couple of weeks ago and began adding new pages almost daily. New pages were indexed quickly and fresh listing for the homepage - and some interior pages. On two sites, as a matter of fact.

[DerekH]

Marcia wrote

I'm not sure just changes on the page is enough in some cases

Curiously, the opposite seems to be true too - I have authored a site for a local charity that sits on a free ISP. There is a domain name that sits with another ISP and acts as a cloaking frame round the whole site. This gives the site a www.own-address.org.uk presence for the human visitor.

That cloak never changes from one day to the next, but Google will often show it as fresh every day for 2 weeks, with a different fresh date each day, and then, for no reason, it will not visit it for the next two.

DerekH

[dawlish]

Thanks for the responses. Can anyone shed any light on the issue regarding different results positions?

[abates]

If it helps, if you use the noarchive flag to tell Google not to cache the pages, they will never get fresh tags...