Is Google really Updating Itself?

[mikeD]

I have a site with about 1500 pages and I have pages 3 deep that have never truely been updated for months. The title tag may be updated in Google but nothing else such as the content. This is a pr7 site that does get crawled most days but the changed ranking of updated pages is never being done.

[storevalley]

The title tag may be updated in Google but nothing else such as the content

Are you sure you haven't got some kind of technical problem? Have a look at Google's cache of the pages in question to see if your content is being crawled properly.

[GoogleGuy]

You might want to check if your web server is responding correctly to If-Modified-Since queries. If we ask the web server "Has your content changed?" and your web server says "Nope" then I could imagine the situation that you're describing happening.

Cheers,
GoogleGuy

[ThomasB]

Will the ranking be worse if a dynamically generated site (10k+ sites indexed) will add this header?
For us it would reduce the traffic a lot and increase the performance of the server.

[GoogleGuy]

It wouldn't make any scoring difference, so if it would ease the load on your server, I would deinitely use if-modified-since. You might have to be a little more careful/aware with dynamically generated pages (e.g. keep a cache or something). But if your pages are dynamically generated but only change once a week or something, then IMS can be a big help. Now if your pages truly do change every single time that they're created (e.g. a forum where people post a lot, so that the page typically changes every few minutes--something like slashdot), then IMS isn't going to be as much of a win. My advice is to enable IMS when you can though--it's usually pretty easy, and for the spiders that support it, it can save you some bandwidth.