Google and Freshness

[parahost]

I have heard that if a page on your site is updated a lot, it gets a freshness boost and is visited by google more often.... My question is, how much of the site has to change? 1 sentence, 2 sentences, etc... If I were to make a list that randomly changed such as:

Item one
Item two
Item three

In the navigation bar (these would be links outside), would that be enough to consider to my page fresh?

[troels nybo nielsen]

> how much of the site has to change?

Very few people know and they won't tell! :)

[BillyS]

My site gets a fresh tag daily... I change about 5 - 7 lines of text each day - basically the introductory paragraph to a new article.

[BigDave]

It seems to be a combination of things including PR. My home page rarely changes, but seems to perpetually have a fresh tag, as does my "recent reviews" page which has a lower PR but tends to get updated an average of 20 times a week.

I suspect, though I have not proven to myself, that pages pointed to by frequently updated and regularly "freshed" pages are more likely to be freshed even without being updated.

By the way, it isn't really a "freshness boost" so much as a "freshness reranking". While it appears that you get a boost more often than not, you can also see a drop in ranking while you have the fresh tag.

In the long run, I think you are better off concentrating your effort on more quality content, and getting more links, than you are by spending your time trying to get a constant fresh tag.

[jayq]

How do you know you have a fresh tag?

[troels nybo nielsen]

In SERPs your page has a date just to the left of the word "Cached". Right now I'm looking at a SERP where some pages show 27 Feb 2005.

[sailorjwd]

I don't see any connection between changing content and visits by the bot. Most of my pages have been static for 1-2 years and most get spidered nearly daily.

[caveman]

Changing content is one of the ways to increase chances of more frequent bot visits. Not the only way.

[claus]

>> In the long run, I think you are better off concentrating your effort on [other stuff]

Exactly. Fresh tag is of no use by itself. Why should you change your pages only to get them respidered if they already do well unchanged? Your time will probably be better spent on developing new content than modifying the old.

Come to think of it, i actually rambled a bit about this in September 2003: Fresh tag? What is it good for? [webmasterworld.com]

When Google introduced "Freshbot" you could be given a "Fresh boost" in rankings. Afaik, this is not the case anymore, and "Freshbot" was later merged with "Deepbot" to become "deepfreshbot" - first mentioned june 2003 [webmasterworld.com] (msg #4) and confirmed here [webmasterworld.com] (msg #20)

If there's no new content, a fresh tag seems to do nothing for you.

[patoruzu]

>>It seems to be a combination of things including PR<<

I arrived at the same conclusion some time ago. Based on observations on my own site, when its PR increases, it gets a daily fresh tag for the following days. But if the home page is not updated on that period (let’s say 15 days), the fresh tag is not so frequently showed in the SERPs. On the other hand, none of this seems to affect the rankings in the SERPs.