Regaining Fresh Tags

Is losing fresh tags a penalty?

[BillyS]

My latest website is totally a labor of love right now. I've been to the dark side and back. I found that playing in the dark is too much work. So my approach is clean, fresh content:

- A new article everyday appears on the top of my home page in a rotating pattern that pushes the previous day's article down one place.

- I always show the first three paragraphs of the latest 3 articles and have 4 more links to articles that are more than 3 days old. Basically I rotate in fresh content daily.

The website started in May, I now have over 170 articles in the website. Google currently has nearly all the pages in the index. Here is my problem:

Since the end of June Google recognized that my home page changed daily and I showed fresh tags. On October 10th, googlebot stopped visiting my home page (index.php) daily. It does visit the rest of my site daily, just not the home page.

None of the last 7 articles I wrote have been cached yet. Is this a penalty? Is this just growing pains? Why would googlbot suddenly ignore my home page?

[the_nerd]

They might be a bit slow on the indexing side these days. Just did an update for an old site - added a couple of pages. Now the new pages got fresh tags and are in the cache - the old pages (that have changed, but kept their old names are still umchanged in the index.) let's wait for a couiple of days and see what happens.

[surfgatinho]

Could someone define "fresh tags" for me please?

Thanks

[randle]

Its a small date, under the snippet in the results, between the URL listed and the word "cache". It's the date of the last cache of that site.

Generally in Google the higher the PR, the more often you see that date updated. If its pretty recent, its a "fresh tag".

Hope this helps.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks Randle

[mark1615]

What is the advantage of fresh tags? We have pages that have been static for awhile that get them. Does it do something?

This leads me to another question I have had for some time. G supposedly values "fresh" content - but how? Does it just visit a site that updates more often? I haven't seen anything to suggest it effects the SERPs.

[BillyS]

Generally in Google the higher the PR, the more often you see that date updated.

That is what I thought too. Worked the other way around for me. As my PR went up from PR2 - PR4, the fresh tag went away.