Random articles on the frontpage

[punisa]

Hi !
I'm preparing to launch a new site soon,
at the bottom, that is at my footer area I have a couple of news articles from my site singled out.

These 8 headlines I pull from database by using "ORDER BY RAND()" so each time a visitor clicks on page, some other articles appear in a random manner.

Would does Google think on this?
By doing so am I doing a good or bad thing for my site?
It is a "dynamic" site after all : D

Bottom line is, my every page will thus be cca 10% different each time you visit it.

Thanks for your opinions in advance.

[tedster]

A ten percent change should not create a ranking problem for you. News sites have home pages that change much more than that. Of course, when a story leaves the home page, then the home page cannot continue to rank for the keywords that only appear in that headline.

If you have concern about this, you could serve the rotating headlines to your visitors in an iframe - then they will not be indexed as part of the page itself because they are actualy on a different url.

[leadegroot]

I have used a mod statement on a numeric unique identifier in the past to rotate entries, but not constantly changing. It seems to work - both freshness and not-constantly-changing (so you don't make manual reviewers wrongly suspicious that you are cloaking)

Assuming that the field ID is a numeric primary key on the table, try something like:

SELECT * , ID % DAYOFMONTH(CURDATE()) as modToday FROM tablename ORDER BY modToday

This gives you a fresh layout each day (assuming you have a decent number of entries) but it will be the same from minute to minute

[punisa]

Thanks for your replies!
leadegroot, that's great bit of code. I'll be definitely needing it : D