Getting Google to update my sites

[bellrj]

I am a part-time web designer and I've got a couple of sites in Google (PR4 or 5) which do well for their keywords - all credit goes to this forum for that! :) Since they were first listed by Google I have added more information to all the sites with the aim of getting higher PR and better listings. However, I've been watching for two months now but Google doesn't seem to want to update its listings for any of the sites. I also have a PR3 site that I totally redesigned (added more text content) that I'd love Google to revisit as I think it's worth a PR4 now.

For each site I added the content in chunks. I.e. I built the site, left it a month or two, added another few pages in one go, left it for a while, etc. I don't have the time to add new content every day to keep the freshbot happy.

Each site has a robots.txt like below (slightly different directory names on each site for the format is the same) which validates OK using the robots.txt validation tool. Obviously most of the pages are not in any of the disallowed directories :P.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /clientarea/
Disallow: /stats/

Am I doing anything wrong or am I being impatient? Any help would be much appreciated.

[Susanne]

Have you changed navigation? Can you see Googlebot in your stats? Is it a dynamic site?

[rogerd]

Bellrj, one thing you can try is a tool like Xenu to spider your site yourself to be sure that your site is easily for a robot to navigate. If all seems fine, try a link from your home page to the new content if you don't already have one - that may tease GB into checking it out.

[bellrj]

Susanne - I haven't changed the overall structure of the sites although I have added to it in some cases. The relatively larger sites also have a text sitemap. I use DHTML navigation in two sites but I also use a text navigation menu at the bottom of the pages, and link to certain pages through the home page text. None of the sites are dynamic. I shall have to check out the logs again when I get home but IIRC Google has dropped by the home page but doesn't do anything else. I can't say if it was the freshbot or the regular crawler - I'll have to dig out the IP info from these forums and compare them to the logs.

rogerd - I have never used Xenu before but I've now found the home page and it looks good so I'll give it a go when I get home. I think my links should be ok but I'll go over them with a fine toothcomb.

Thank you both for those suggestions.