Update Frequency & Date Stamps

[smithaa02]

Recently a competing website passed us in google SERP rankings which is strange because content quality/content quantity/backlinks all don't seem to stack up against us.

Curious thing they do is put a php m-d-y snippet near the top of their page which google is including in their serps as part of their description. Seen this with other sites too where if google smells a date, it can sneak it next to what google assigns your meta description.

Here's my question... We know update frequency helps a website and individual pages particularly, right? This matches what I've personally experienced and what I've read from others. Correct me if I'm wrong...

Now unfortunately, we may only go a week or two between updates on our home page... Because our competitor has this auto-date stamp at the top of their page, does this mean in the eyes of google our competitor is a more hopping and updated homepage even though their 'daily changes' consist of mere date changes which obviously happen on a daily basis?

Should we all be including things like dates on homepages to increase our 'update frequency'? Anybody else have experiences with this?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have a site that can be considered static which ranks above sites that have datestamps. I don't think you can draw final conclusions about datestamps from what you just saw happen.

I think it's also coincidence that the datestamp is appearing in serp snippets, if the datestamp was moved lower on the page it would not appear. Google knows when THEY first see a page and that's more important to them than wwhen your site says it was published. What they see from that first pass is the foundation for the rest of their algorithmic magic. A datestamp is probably not very important to Google though it does help visitors which Google recognizes.

There might be a small rank bonus for having an author/date posted, who knows, but it's useful for visitors so you should probably have one if your content/site isn't static.