Daily Freshness tag - but stale content

does my competition have an edge?

[Drum]

I noticed that my competition's site shows that all of its pages are fresh as of 2AM every morning - however all of his pages never change day to day.

Does he have an advantage over my site which also have stale content?

[DrDoc]

Interesting question... Anyone has an answer?

[thumpcyc]

Not enough information for an answer.

Are you totally sure, that nothing changes, and I mean nothing, on each page everyday? Slight alterations, of wording, reversal of wording, spaces, dates, and many, many other slight changes might be missed by the visual eye.

If changes are made, scripted to happen at a scheduled time, And Then scripted to be published daily might possibly explain this.

Without More Info, Pure Speculation
;-)

[Ride45]

This suggests 2 things:

1. Your competitor does their content updating late at night (if they are married, probably long after their wife and kids are asleep), and their work is therefore like clockwork.

2. Your competitor may make even 1 small change to a page, such as add a link, or multiple links to a link exchange edited by hand, but when they FTP their pages, they figure once they are uploading they will just "select all" pages and update their entire directory. It also puts a fresh date stamp on everything.

I am probably not your competitor, but this is my typical routine...

[edited by: Ride45 at 11:32 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2004]

[bakedjake]

Does he have an advantage over my site which also have stale content?

Yes, if for no other reason than having the ability to test once a day at a known time.

[usavetele]

"Yes, if for no other reason than having the ability to test once a day at a known time."

Lost me on that one. Test what?

[Drum]

More info about my competitor:

I used the Ranks density tool to see how many words in had in his home page - and every day it has 418 words even though the "last-modified" tag indicates it was updated at 2am.

Also, he is running is site on his own co-lo server which has Apache on it - so i am sure he can change things freely.

[sabai]

"Yes, if for no other reason than having the ability to test once a day at a known time."

Make changes to the page and see how the changes affect his ranking

[anallawalla]

Make a copy of his page for 2-3 days and compare them with a diff tool.

My guess is that changing the time stamp alone should do it. I used to have a non-competing SERP squatter above or below me who did this daily (presume a crontab was used) and relied on what was called the Freshbot effect to stay at the top.

If he does it manually, heavens, he might as well take a minute to improve or change the messaging.

[dannyboy]

Isn't it possible his pages are dynamically generated (cgi, php, asp) so their date of last modification will always change?

Perhaps he has something on the sidebar (eg, news feeds, recent commens, recent articles, etc) that changes often?