Is anyone else seeing an absence of "fresh" dates?

A sign?

[rfgdxm1]

I'm just not seeing the usual fresh tag that I would expect to see at the moment on sites that commonly update, like news ones. Anyone else seeing a lack of minty freshness?

[mortalfrog]

I haven't run into any fresh tags so far this afternoon... that is definitely odd!

[Slud]

This happens quite often. I'm don't claim to know what the cause is.

Here's a query that'll give you an idea how active the "Fresh" bot has been recently.

[google.com...]

[bobmark]

actually, no. This happened from about the 20th. to the 24th of this month and I thought maybe it was a sign then, but on the 25th. new fresh dates appeared.
of course it could be Google was going to update perio to the 25th, didn't make it and freshened. Then again, it could be meaningless.

[Tropical Island]

How's this for a theory?
Google's new algo is so complicated that when they tried to run it it corrupted all their servers.

Evidence.
No Fresh dates.
All servers exactly the same results.
AdWords showing nothing but zeroes in the reports.
No update.

My case rests.

[bobmark]

I am always open to any theory that relies on simple blunders, Tropical Island, so your guess is as good as any. There is a tendency here to ascribe a hyper level of competence to Google that should be foreign to anyone's experience with any enterprise. I don't know how the Google mystique grew up: good Public Relations (as opposed to PR) or are we so desperate to believe someone out there is smarter than us?

[rfgdxm1]

Or just enter "news" into Google and search. The news at the moment ain't too fresh. ;) All the servers showing basically the same results is consistent with a lack of fresh content making it into the SERPs. Please note the Fresh bot *is* out there. It's hit my main site daily for the last 5 days. I have to assume the same is true for the PageRank biggie news sites too. The Freshbot prowls, but what it finds fresh is not making it into the index.

I'm wondering of this happening is a sign of calm before the storm? Possibly that earlier calm period was Google preparing for an update, which they nixed because they found something wrong with the new algo? At the moment Google just seems to be treading water.

[rfgdxm1]

>I am always open to any theory that relies on simple blunders, Tropical Island, so your guess is as good as any.

An alternate theory is this isn't a blunder, but what we are seeing is a major upgrade being done. In March the update didn't happen until April 6. If Google was in the middle of a major hardware upgrade, or testing new software, it would make sense to just freeze the old index until they finished.

[zeus]

I use to get fresh tag every 2-3 day, but not this or last week.

zeus

[chris_w]

Same here - all quiet on the date front 20-24 then fresh date on a lot of pages (>200) on 25th then nothing since. PR7 site.

[Powdork]

I'm wondering of this happening is a sign of calm before the storm? Possibly that earlier calm period was Google preparing for an update, which they nixed because they found something wrong with the new algo? At the moment Google just seems to be treading water.

I got a decent answer to the same question earlier today here [webmasterworld.com]

[rfgdxm1]

>I got a decent answer to the same question earlier today here

But nobody is seeing fresh dates on whatever box they end up connecting to. It's as if Google is for whatever reason intentionally not allowing the freshes into the index.

[aek]

The database is showing fresh pages though, even if it isn't putting fresh next to the results. A page I updated 2 days ago is showing the new version. Not sure why they're not putting fresh next to these listings though.

[Powdork]

rfgdxm 1
good point

[Yidaki]

odd, also no more fresh tags at google.de .... hmmm.

[TheComte]

Same here. No fresh dates, but fresh cache on a number of pages. Maybe the update this month was just a cache update of existing pages. Maybe the dance is over and we missed it. :(

[coconutz]

A page I updated 2 days ago is showing the new version.

The freshbot has visited us daily since the 25th, but our pages haven't been updated since then. :(

[rfgdxm1]

>Maybe the update this month was just a cache update of existing pages. Maybe the dance is over and we missed it.

I doubt it. Google is just unusually late this month with the update for some reason. Someone reported seeing this unusual absence of fresh dates earlier in the month. This might be just something quirky about Google.

[bobmark]

To this point, Googlebot and Freshbot (I am too tired to go look up freshbot's real ID in my logs) don't communicate well. Freshbot works all month freshening and, come the update, it seems like the new index does not contain those results so Freshbot has to start all over again.
I assume in future fresh results will get incorprated into the update, but I haven't seen it so far.

[johnraphone]

I haven't got any Fresh sites sence October 26th.

[x_m]

I'd say it means nothing. I remember previous dance started when results have been full of fresh daily updates and I thought dance will not start soon ;)
XM

[GoogleGuy]

Hey, we sometimes run experiments with our fresh crawl. I think I mentioned this in another thread, but we're always playing with which sites to crawl, how deeply to crawl, how to mark sites as fresh, etc. Freshness is a major emphasis at Google, and it's not going to go away. But we also need to be able to try new experiments.

For example, if you view the cached page for cnn, you get a page from Oct. 26th. That's pretty fresh, if you think about how most search engines work. :)

So in summary: just because you don't see a "fresh" tag doesn't mean that the results aren't pretty new. For people who want more info about our fresh crawl, I'd encourage you to read the thread at
[webmasterworld.com...]

[edit_g]

We put the date on our pages to test the fresh thing- we are showing 26th Oct as well.

[Powdork]

For example, if you view the cached page for cnn, you get a page from Oct. 26th. That's pretty fresh, if you think about how most search engines work. -GG

Yes but mysite.com has been minted with every date this month and each time when the fresh dates disappeared, the ranking stayed the same and the cache was consistent with the content as of the last fresh crawl. This time the cache has reverted to that of previous months indexes and the ranking has dropped to exactly where it was last month.

And from the other thread

My advice on our fresh crawl is to view it as a nice "bonus" on top of Google's deep index. -GG

Yeah, I and was stoked about the nice bonus, but when I went to cache the check....I mean check the cache, of course;)
Forunately, thanks to all the fine folks in this forum I advised the client when their ranking moved to number 1 that it would skip up and down this month. So far, it hadn't though. Oh, well, there's always the Octember update.