Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What are the benfits of doing updates like this across all the pages. It seems that google will at the least spider the pages more frequently. Can this help in page rankings?
i have some pages that are in top 20 like around 15. even a boost of 3 to 5 places would help a lot in this situation. Can doing page updates help my rankings go up a place or two? Can it hurt?
Updating sites helps with supplementals.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 4:53 pm (utc) on July 25, 2007]
what are supplementals?
Supplemental Results: What exactly are they? [webmasterworld.com]
That thread is in our Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] area, which is always pinned to the top of the Google Search forum's index page.
...thinking about putting it on all my pages as a standard widget item.
I'd be very cautious about placing the exact same content on every url. If you do that, it's going to modify the relevance of every page where it appears by blurring the actual topic of each topic. If you go with this featrue for your users, I would suggest putting it in an iFrame. That way there's only one html file for the updated content, and that file is not part of each page's html. You might put the content directly into the Home Page, but I think placing it everywhere could quickly be problematic.
I know my idea runs counter to your idea of frequent updates helping your pages to rank better - but in my experience, frequency of change is not really a key factor in ranking -- it might bring you more frequent spidering, yes, but that's not the same as a ranking improvement. Many more ranking problems can come from "semantic fuzziness" around the page's exact topic than would come from infrequent page updates.
[edited by: tedster at 3:13 am (utc) on July 26, 2007]
What are the benfits of doing updates like this across all the pages. It seems that google will at the least spider the pages more frequently. Can this help in page rankings?
Yes, it helps, I am managing a frequently updated site, and Google crawl and index it everyday. The overall ranking is quite high though the website is still young - 1.5 year old, and does not have many links.
Keep updating and you will see that Google love your site.
Cheers
From my own observations on 3 sites I would be willing to bet that this is the case.
I'm not cautious at all - I throw it in the wind - but! I do keep a firm grip on my common sense. I have content that appears on every URL and it hasn't hurt me. They're called "header," "footer" and "site navigation." ;)
Ok, facetiousness aside...
I too have a "latest news" widget that appears on every page. In my case, it's an Apache SSI, so I have to only edit one file to make site-wide changes. It is updated, oh, about one a week usually, so it is sort of evergreen content. Besides the brief summary of the news, there is also the date the news was last updated and a link to my (comprehensive) news page.
As stated, I'm not cautious about adding the widget but common sense says, as tedster rightly notes, it does add to the dilution of the page's theme. And that's why the widget has a brief summary, one sentence of about 50 characters (at most). Keeping it so short also makes it excellent practice for creating compelling, yet short, copy.
Do I think it has helped my rankings (in any engine)? No, I highly doubt it.
Do I think it has hurt? Again, no.
Has it increased spidering? I feel it hasn't; it's too small a percentage change in content to make the page seem to be evergreen.
Has it decreased spidering? Broken record (err, skipping CD?) here... I don't think so.
Do I care about what the SEs think about it? No, I build for humans, not search engines.
Do I think it can be used in a SEO fashion? Oh, certainly!
Of course, many of the pages, themselves, go without any updates from me. Thus, they do not have a fresh date stamp. Wonder if this detracts from freshness?
Bottom line, I can't see where it's hurting. If anyone has another view, I'd love to hear it.
Keeping pages up to date means viewers get the latest info. which is a positive.
But updating a page is NOT a guarantee for rankings improvement. A page that has had recent updates to improve the viewer experience has dropped from #3 to #54, presumably because things like keyword density and topic relevance have changed.
A better question is "Will frequent page updates improve my traffic numbers?" The answer is probably yes, if you are adding new content that allows the page to connect with a broader range of search terms... hence the increase in traffic as opposed to just the focus on one search term ranking.
Many more ranking problems can come from "semantic fuzziness" around the page's exact topic than would come from infrequent page updates.
Tedster is very right, as usual. "Redundant" text appearing on each page foils Gbot's word stemming routines, and also makes Gbot suspicous.
.
The one different factor is that if you update these news blocks frequently, Google will have different versions on different groups of pages, depending on how their spidering lines up with your changes. But that's also goofy -- if you rank for a term in the news block that's changed since the last spidering, then you get traffic that can't find their search terms.
All that points me again to an iframe solution as the best from many angles.
