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Sites that are updated frequently seem to keep the bot coming around. The crux of the matter is creating good content though. If you manage to rank well for that new content, and it's written poorly, the surfers won't be nearly as impressed with it as that mindless bot. It's the surfers you want to attract. Write a bunch of tripe everyday and the bot will come back to feast, surfers however, will find better fare.
In fact Ive got a sneaking suspician that Google may be trying to isolate "news" content from other less time dependent web content.
We run some news sites, and we are very happy getting news.google hits. But even I would question whether people really want to find "breaking news" when they enter a keyword phrase in Google proper. Maybe generally people are loooking for broader info..
So if you are looking for news, g would like you to go the news tab, and if you are looking to buy something they would expect you to look on the right hand side and up top in pastels. And soon, if you are looking to shop, you can click the catalogue/shop link ;)
I am wondering if google will still come by now and then once I am only updating weekly. I guess I am asking how often you need to update to still be crawled regularly.
Anne