Whens the best time to make changes for GoogleBot?

[needhelp]

I was told that google sends out multiple spiders: the first looks at your page and takes notes on what it found. The next goes back and if it finds different stuff, it gets confused and doesn't want to crawl. If this is true, is there a window every month when I can make updates to my site (text updates, not graphics)? ...Like changing info about current promotions I'm running. I'm so afraid to change anything on my site that I've been running a huge sale for longer than I want! Thanks in advance for your help.

[heini]

Needhelp, a good time would probably be during the update. It has been for a while now that after the update heavy deep crawling was coming from Google.
Now we have the fresbot, which looks for fresh content. The freshbot anyhow doesn't have regular patterns, it's still in somewhat experimental use.

[Tropical Island]

We update info daily on our sites. We are now showing fresh tags of Nov. 5 on both sites. We were heavily crawled over the last 2 days. 1 site had 127 visits from a variety of Googlebots after being missed last month due to a server change screwup.

[cwebb]

Maybe that was a GoogleBot party at your site?

[Tropical Island]

If it was a party they sure must have liked what they found as they invited everybody. We had at least 8 different GoogleBots visitng.

[needhelp]

Sorry all, but I don't know much and I'm trying to learn... what are indications that an update is going on and I can start changing my site to be prepared for the deep crawl? Maybe a better question is: Are there any indications that tell me to definitely NOT touch anything on my site?

[rogerd]

Needhelp, I'd operate on the assumption that you can be spidered at any time. If you are going to make changes, make them sooner rather than later, and avoid partial changes that leave broken links, etc. I.e., upload your changes in one fell swoop. If you have dynamic content that you need to test, do so on unlinked pages, and then copy them to the real page names when everything is working.

Having said that, Google most commonly spiders deeply after the update is in progress - near the end of one month- beginning of the next.

[wasmith]

>> takes notes on what it found. The next goes back and if it finds different stuff, it gets confused and doesn't want to crawl.

I don't think this is the case at all, that would just be a signal that your site needs freshbot.

I assume that the basic keywords are the same and that if the page was hit by the first spiderings IP address the lastest page would be shown.

Whatever you want to be found for people doing searches in the month of january needs to be online and accessable by the end of this month (around thanksgiving), but there is no need to wait just make sure that after the dance your site is online live and ready to be crawled.

Freshbot, of cource likes new information it AFAIK does not change PR or take off page information into account. That being said if the keywords you are interested in for the month of Dec are not so competive that you must have links pointing to them with the keywords. and you have a few pages with good PR for those keywords freshbot is the bot for you.

For freshbot I change content for every bot visit. But maybe i am working too hard? i see other sites with fresh listing that really have not changed.

-------- Added

for what shows in Dec based on the full crawl, i am thinking its past cutoff but i may be wrong i would not call it quits untill the 11th or 12th. Its now or next year for dec SERPs

[needhelp]

Hmmm...still a bit confused! For Freshbot, frequent updates are good. But, with regular Googlebot (deep crawler), updates should be done carefully... So how does one target both Freshbot with new updates and still be in the safe zone for Googlebot's deep crawl?

Sorry if I'm nowhere near the point guys!

I'm thinking of renaming my files to include my keyword phrase since my domain does not have any keywords (back in '98, I didn't realize targeting SE's would be more important that branding - oops!). I'm trying to figure out when to do this and not get my site dinged.

[dvduval]

This is somewhat of a repeat, but it seems to me the deep crawler...
(the one that...
1) decides which new sites will show on the next update
2) calculates PageRank
3) looks at the links on the pages it crawls to calculate PageRank for the pages that page links to)
...usually comes a knockin within the 5-7 days following the monthly update.