Why no "Fresh" pages for me in the SERPS

Has freshbot seen my new pages?

[DerekH]

I stumbled on this excellent forum 3 weeks ago and have lurked daily since. Three years ago I put up a small site for a particular community group I run and have enhanced it extensively in the last 3 weeks following the suggestions people have posted. In particular I've added some community news that I'd like people to stumble on before it goes out of date!
I perhaps need to add that the pages are on a free ISP, as our budget is tiny. But the site does have its own domain name, and it all gets indexed nicely, and does well in its sector (number 2 with a 2-word keyword search out of 600,000 sites).
Now my *other* site (on a different topic) has shown itself (in a different keyword search) recently with a date on the search results page, on and off, indicating freshbot has been there. My community site, however, has no such indications.
Because of the way my site is hosted, I can't get hold of server logs, but it has the same pagerank as my "other" site, which has apparently been visited every other day for a week now, and marginally more incoming links of good quality.
If I can get extra visitors to my site in the next 3 weeks I may be able to raise money for a local charity because of some news on my site. How can I get a "fresh" listing in the index, even if it's only there sporadically till the next deep crawl, so that people can see it?

Any ideas much appreciated. Treat me gently, I'm a newbie!
Derek

[takagi]

Hi DerekH, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

There is no guaranty that a date is printed on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if freshbot visits your site and updates the data in the index. Since you cannot use the log file, you need some other way to find out if/when a page was updated in the index. One way is to put a date on your page or frequently change the title. Another way is to use the 'Archived copy' function of Comet Web Search (see cached page date? [webmasterworld.com] thread) that displayes the date of Google's cache.

> How can I get a "fresh" listing in the index
On the short term (3 weeks), it could be difficult. It helps to have links from pages that are often visited by freshbot. It also helps if you often change the text on the page. But that change should be more than just an extra word or so.

[DerekH]

Thank you Tagaki
You've given me some more suggestions, and I'm more than happy to try them out while we wait to see what's going to happen next to the indexes!
Regards
Derek