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Alright. Here's the tale:
I take great pride in making sure my site is always minty fresh. I try to add at least a half dozen new pages and update at least another half dozen each and every day. So, when I found out that Wally Widget had a new CD coming out on October 29th, I rushed to get a page up before October 1 so that it might get into the October update. The CD was expected to be a very big seller for good ole Wally.
I succeeded.
To make it even better, Google's freshbot came and slapped my "Wally Widget's Greatest Hits" album into the index the very next day. I enjoyed a #3 ranking, right below Wally's Official Homepage and a WTV (I want my Widget TV!) article about the album's upcoming release. Right up until 2 days before the October 29th release date, I held that #3 spot and outranking several major media sources who had published articles on it. I enjoyed considerable traffic and made some good money off people "pre-ordering" Wally's newest disc from my site. I was salivating over what would actually happen to sales once it came out - I hoped for a 50% or higher increase just based on the availability of the item alone.
Meanwhile, all month long, I continued to add new content and update older content and just generally keeping my site nice and fresh. To my horror, two days before the 29th release date, Freshbot decided that my other newer pages were fresher than Wally's Greatest Hits page, and stopped freshing it due to the fact that it only had time to fresh a certain number of pages each day.
And, so it was, on the day of the album's highly anticipated release, my listing had completely vanished. And, when the update finally occurred (several days after the release) I was also pushed back to the third page as all of the major retailers had gotten their pages into the update.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely heartbroken - there are still other fresh pages on my site generating revenue, though it'll probably be a month or two before another product comes along that has the sales potential of good ole Wally Widget.
I can't help second guessing myself, though. What if I'd waited a week to add the page? I might have missed the October update, but it would likely have remained "fresh" right up through the release date - and those first 2-3 days are the biggest days for selling. Or, what if I wasn't so dilligent about keeping my site fresh? If I'd made just a half dozen or so fewer updates to my site over the course of the month, I would have enjoyed that #3 spot right up until (and slightly into) the start of the update two days after the release date.
I find the whole topic very intriguing right now, though I doubt we'll be able to come up with a definitive answer to anything in this forum.
For the first time since the VERY early days of the internet, Google has provided almost instant (36-48 hours is pretty instant, really) exposure to new web pages. The story above illustrates that there is a new element to traffic optimization we've never had to consider before - when does our site become TOO fresh? In essence, my efforts to stay fresh probably cost me in excess of $200-$300.
G.
could be something to your theory of waiting a couple of days and having too many new pages, as Google probalby only awards you a certain amount of Fresh pages and for a certain time.
Certain pages receive more or less permanent Freshness, but then just mentioning Wally Widget somewhere in the body text would probably not beat an anchortext link and a Wally title of a new page.
I would say it could help to play with your links from pages peramanently awarded Freshness towards this new Wally Widget page.
So, first week only one link from your index page to Wally Widget, second week a new link from your site map to Wally widgets (assuming the site map is also permanently Fresh).
Havn't tried it though.
I've been considering this alot recently and although I'm not as technical as some of the optimizers here (eg. No hard data to offer) I've noticed that my fresh pages usually have a shelf life or 3-5 days.
Reading your post, I see you're getting more than that right? So this implies that there is some factors at work that (i don't think) we've discussed regarding Fresh listings. Or did I miss it?
Something that would really interest me is just how much text do you have to change to keep an established page Fresh?
Nick
all we add is the title of two new news stories in the sidebar every second day
so we are only changing about 10 words and the two <a href> every second day, and manage a fresh listing throughout the month. fresh in this case means google puts the previous day's date next to our listing every second or third day.
although last month this only worked until the 20th or so - after that the date disappeared, and google showed our cached page from 3 weeks ago?!
i think they are still ironing out the bugs in this freshness thing.
we also add a 'published on 06.11.2002' next to the news stories. i don't know whether this has any effect.
for our chosen keyword, only 3 of the top ten have a 'fresh' date listing.
AFAICT, any change. I've got nailed with a fresh tag after a single word typo change after Googlebot spotted it.
Craig
[webmasterworld.com...]
I updated all the pages on my site last month over a period of a couple of weeks. Freshbot came everyday until and then stopped coming a couple of days after I had finished updating. This kind of makes me think that if you keep updating the page(s) freshbot will keep coming.
JOAT
The If-Modified-Since is a header field in the HTTP request header that a UA may send to make a conditional request. The server will send the page only if it was modified since the date the UA supplied in the request header.
Both are not neccessarily related and certainly not the same.
Andreas
Reading your post, I see you're getting more than that right? So this implies that there is some factors at work that (i don't think) we've discussed regarding Fresh listings. Or did I miss it?
Constantly fresh on my site (though sometimes the date will vanish, they always has a cached version no more than about 4-6 days old): My Homepage, two pages that are in the DMOZ, and an ancient "site of the week" page that is linked to by a very prominent and news-filled web site. Above that, I usually have somewhere between a dozen and fifty other pages with a fresh tag - always linked directly from one of the "Always" freshed pages.
<added> I did have time where there were over 100 freshed pages from my site - only once and only for about 2 days. Not sure what triggered the jump</added>
Interestingly, on the 2 new (less than 6 weeks) subdomains I have, there is always 1 fresh (sometimes as many a 4 on one of them) but the page that gets freshed varies and it isn't always the front page.
Text that has to change? Not much. That ancient page from my "site of the week" award has a date stamp at the very bottom and the "Users Online" number changes. Everything else on the page is constant. I get almost no traffic to that page from Google (there isn't much there that someone would search for), but I believe that that is the original "seed" page that freshbot used when first deciding that my site was worth freshcrawling. (It's my highest ranked inbound link - last I looked the page it linked from was a PR8, though that may have dropped with the PR reshuffle this past month).
G.
