The Fresh Wave?

[Brett_Tabke]

One of the legendary old SEO tricks was played with Infoseek. They used to spider and update instantly. This lead to building sites that did nothing but ride current events.

It used to work this way:

- wait until something major happened in the world.
- go do searches and find everything you can about the topic.
- build a quick page that you updated as fast as you could.
- submit to infoseek and wait to get spidered.

With Infoseeks instant indexing, you could build a page and have it pulling several thousand referrals within an hour or two.

Anyone playing the Google "fresh" sweepstakes? If so, how's it working?

[troels nybo nielsen]

Maybe you just ruined someone's good idea by speaking openly about it? Now a lot of people will be trying. ;-)

I have thought about doing something like that. But only with issues that are really related to one of my sites.

[mack]

You have no idea how much I wish I had been online in the days when this sort of thing was happeneing. It would be exciting to think this is possible with Google now.

[Brett_Tabke]

SEO is like fashion - all the good ideas stand the test of time, but they go in/out of fashion from time to time.

They all laughed when I kept that drawer full of bell bottoms, pet rocks, and mood rings..

[fathom]

Anyone playing the Google "fresh" sweepstakes? If so, how's it working?

Mostly experimenting.

The fact that the refresh bot crawls everyday (here anyway) allows a certain amount of instantaneous "control" (bearing in mind that many other pages are refreshed as well) to better appreciate what works and what is more loosely labeled as hype.

Been playing with pages that don't produce much to begin with and low competition.

As for refresh sweepstakes... not yet.

It does have a certain "holiday" ring to it though... time sensitive promotions, discounts, and such.

[Bosslady]

Googlebot has been very nice to me, and boy is he ever fresh.
Working good for me.:-)

[percentages]

Freshbot is "da bomb"...For all those that think Google has something against SEO think again.

Freshbot is now allowing us to reposition sites on a daily basis. In the old days my clients used to think I could drag and drop sites into any position I chose.....now, thanks to freshbot I can!

I love freshbot, it is an SEO dream come true. A daily maniputable update of an engine that controls 80%+ of the market....what more could any SEO dream of :) Well okay 80%+ in one basket is dangerous, however good it may seem at the moment, but it is fun;)

The monthly dance is now an irrelevance, I'm going to bed and sleeping sound from now on. Freshbot and a little manipulation will take care of any damage done from the "dance".

Thanks Google, I'll forgive you for all the screw ups between July and October, Freshbot was worth waiting for:)

A minor suggestion, perfect freshbot to crawl new and low PR sites, then we wouldn't have to wait 8 weeks+ to get our new sites into the index;)

[mat]

On a whim I went to w*w.thenameofthespiderweretalkingabout.com

oops - had proxomitron turned off - pop-up hell. But yes, sure enough, someone has parked the domain.

Mat

[fathom]

The monthly dance is now an irrelevance, I'm going to bed and sleeping sound from now on. Freshbot and a little manipulation will take care of any damage done from the "dance".

This isn't exactly true, and the monthly is still very much a player.

Refresh considers only a few pages at a time (this may be 10's of millions but relatively small), which means from daily refresh to daily refresh if your page is missed (and it will be) it disappears back to the previous monthly position.

Also changes you have made to a page will (should get) that refresh often, but leave it alone... doesn't require a refresh and dropped until the monthly.

[Crush]

I am putting on 2 new languages a week on my site. Freshbot gets me to #1 in a jiffy, although the everflux makes me come in and out of the index for a while I still get customers and $$$.

[lazerzubb]

I use this function quite a lot, especially in industries were i can get insider information, which the press haven't snapped up yet, and when they do they publish some short information about it (These keywords are published worldwide), and when people want to know more information they do a search, and bam i'm #1 for the keyword.
But since it's very large companies that releases the news, they publish it, and after 1-2 days, your off the wave, but while your on it, it's huge.

>>The monthly dance is now an irrelevance

Google only recalculate the PageRank once a month, and that's the dance, so it's still very much relevant.

[fathom]

But since it's very large companies that releases the news, they publish it, and after 1-2 days, your off the wave, but while your on it, it's huge.

That's an excellent "forward thinking" tactic lazerzubb! ;) :)

[aek]

The freshbot is brilliant. You can add a page for a newly released or just to be released product one day and the next day people are searching for it and you're earning ££'s.

[mayor]

Regarding spamming breaking news:

Hehe, Brett, that reminds me of the days when I spammed newsgroups and got a flood of untargeted visitors that bought nothing, before my ISP shut me off.

That reminds me of the days when I set up free chat rooms on Yahoo and went around to a bunch of other chat rooms dropping the URL of my chat room, and pulled in thousands of chatters to my room only to spam them with my site URL, and they trampled my site and bought nothing.

That reminds me of the days when VC's threw money at traffic. What a party that was! What a hangover came the next day!

Yep, those were the good ole days! :)

[lazerzubb]

>>That's an excellent "forward thinking"

I know, the only problem is that you need to have this information before it comes out, that's the biggest problem unless you lived where i used to live (hint, hint)

Or if you were in an organistation from the beginning which is now huge, that also helps :)

[olias]

I am just using it to be able to promote a new product up to 7 weeks before my competitors do, it is making a huge difference to the popularity of my site :)
I have toyed with the major news thing, but it is just a bit too much hassle for not much return.

[danny]

I have a machine that can see into the future... stock prices, terrorist attacks, all are revealed to me. But of course I'm only going to use it to do SEO.

[fathom]

News is news... it matters not who creates it, if it is newsworthy people will bite.

when you advertise it costs money... when you are news, it's free! ;)

[Grumpus]

I'm doing well with it. The problem, though, is that all along I've been practicing trying to anticipate what will be news 60 days ahead of time - up until a few months ago, good anticipation was the only way to get the traffic. Now, my ability to do this anticipation has come back to bite me in the proverbial @$$ [webmasterworld.com].

It's not much fun when you jump the gun and the page is no longer fresh anymore by the time it becomes hot news.

G.

[2_much]

Maybe I'm not understanding freshbot correctly, but I've only seen this having an effect with words that are rarely searched for. It almost seems like freshbot's a "filler", not meant to affect keywords or categories that already contain a lot of information.

[lazerzubb]

2_much, yes it true, if you have no previous ranking for the page, it's almost impossible to rank well for a competitive keyword.

Even though there is cases where i have had a good position for some keywords, which i thought was impossible to get even when i had a stable position.

It has to do much with how Google guess your PageRank.

If you have excellent inbound links, and are found that way, you can get a good position, but in most cases you have to target semi-non competitive keywords (beneath a million results found)

[vitaplease]

2much,

you are right, I do not think any mildly competitive search term can be played with. It has to be the third or fourth word added to the competitive search term which could be played with freshly.

[EliteWeb]

:) I admit to it :P heres one;

Google Holidays & Special Days, has anyone played with that or purchased adwords on the day when google changes the link to where their homepage logo goes to. ie: halloween, have you purchased halloween adverts just couz google set their logo

[egomaniac]

I have found it the Fresh experience to work for low competition words, but not for highly competitive words. I recently changed my home page (which gets spidered daily) a few times over a few consecutive days. I saw that page popup in the top 5 for some low competition keywords, where the keywords were present in H2 tags prominent placed on the page.

Interesting idea to daily "update" your content. I don't have the time though for such a strategy.

[gopi]

Interesting idea....but why in the world you want to receive untargeted traffic...

If you are selling banner impressions (good ol' days) then its ok...but if you are a ecommerce outfit then this is sure waste of bandwidth.

[sparrow]

I've been out of ciculation for a while, what is this "freshbot" about and how do you use it, if you use it?

Thanks

[Beachboy]

Sparrow, time to use the site search function for Freshbot. There is a ton of stuff to read.

[jomaxx]

Here's another way to get to the top - or even *above* the top.

Press releases.

I happened to do a search for "frida kahlo" today and noticed that the very first result on the page was from Google news, and it was just a press release from 8 hours earlier. Yahoo! had simply picked it up from Internet Wire.

I don't know what it costs (a hundred or a few hundred $$, probably), how you get Yahoo to put it on their wire, or how long it lasts. But #1 is #1.

[jomaxx]

(Actually it's the second result on the page, after a link to the Google directory.)

[qball0213]

Well I have played with it on a limited basis, only because the news thing hadn't occured to me, du huh. I have kept a brand new site in the index for over a week now, just waiting to see if I can keep it there permanently. It's also good for getting brand new pages in QUICK, freshbot is awesome.