Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Welcome to webmasterworld.
A lot of sites change content each day and it seems to make no difference. For instance, ppc directories change hourly and many sites take news feeds. However, it will show the spider that your site is alive and well, which may keep the spider coming back regularly.
I wonder ..... if the content that changes is 'unique content' and uses current news keywords then you may get flagged as a 'news site' and this could be very good.
Check news.bbc.co.uk in Google - only description no text, however the sub pages for the news which remain more or less static are listed with contents.
Search-wise this will mean you homepage is less likely to be picked up in a Google search, in favour for your more static deep pages.
This makes sense if you think it though: If a page is constant changing there is no guarantee it still contains the searched for terms. However, it seems link additions to your changing page will be picked up more quickly between deep crawls. Swings and roundabouts...
Basically you'll lose the rapidly changing page from the search index but gain it as a seed for other pages for Google to list them.
This is just my experience; I'm not speaking from authority. It depends what you are after. If you do have a rapidly change page, I’d recommend any link you add remains there for at least 24hrs if not more, or it will be missed by the search engines. Of course it all depends on what you are doing; the important thing is always value for users.
If you are doing a news page obviously you want to update it as the news happens or if you are doing something like Slashdot.org users will get upset there are 100s of news items on the front page, so in the BBC news and Slashdot examples this problem is overcome using second stage slower changing category pages linked off an extremely rapidly changing front page. However on the secondary category pages the links will hang around for a longer time.
While this approach is helpful for search engine listings, the thrust of this approach is it is more convenient for the users. So always bear that in mind. There is no point in being listed by a search engine if users will leave immediately because they don’t find what they were looking for. Make sure your previous items can still be easy found.
I’m babbling. I hope this helps in some way…
However your pages probablly will be visited everyday by the freshbot...
Make sure they link to pages that don't change very often(i.e. your articles and news items; for new updates create a new page and link it to the old one and the old to the new - date them as well for users to know which is newest)
Basicily the pages changing regularly seem to push the searchs to the more static pages, however they keep google checking them for new links to pick up. Might be what you want might not be.
Do you want your homepage coming up in searches or your deeper pages? Articles, news items etc.
Also it depends just how much of the page changes...
