Lost Fresh Tags

I lost fresh tags and rankings - are they related?

[onebaldguy]

However, we have not had fresh tags for our pages for over 2 weeks and have also taken a major hit in the SERPS. Could they be related? Google used to crawl our site every other day and we have had the fresh tags for well over a year now.

We did not lose any major links (and have continued to get quality ones) pointing to us and still have a PR7 (or so it would seem, but who knows if the toolbar data is accurate).

We did clean up the site. We had over 44,000 pages in the index, but 20,000 of them had old content and so we started working on getting old info out of the index. It worked, we went from 44,000 pages to 23,000. However, shortly after this is when we lost the fresh tags and our rankings.

[prairie]

Adding or removing a lot of pages at once, including changing file names, can temporarily harm rankings.

Possible Google now needs time to reconsider your whole site.

[DerekH]

It's also the case that pages with a fresh tag are often elevated in the SERPS....

I've a home page that gets visited 2 weeks in every 4 (why that should be is probably a separate thread!).
When it's spidered and has fresh date, it does really well.
When it's not spidered, it slumps and slips downwards.

Cause and effect, perhaps, rather than cause and another cause.
DerekH

[onebaldguy]

I am noticing some weird things happening with the fresh tags. Some competitors that had them before today, now seem to be losing them (even though the cached page is still from the previous day). Other sites are keeping them (and it seems to be consistent across various searches). The sames sites are losing them across the board, whereas other sites are keeping them.

[cabbie]

I swear I saw 21st tags yesterday for a bit.This was after we had 26th tags and before we had 27th tags.I swear!

[jnmconsulting]

somewhat off topic, what exactly are fresh tags... Sorry not real familiar with the lingo!

[BillyS]

somewhat off topic, what exactly are fresh tags

A fresh tag is really just a date tag that appears next to the search result description. For example, if you google the word "adsense", you will see google's site at the top of the list and a date next to the URL.

Back on topic, my website is showing today's date, I have never seen that before. Maybe cause it's late here..

[onebaldguy]

Fresh tags appear next to the URL in the results.

www.example.com/page.htm - 32k - Sep 27, 2004

It shows when the page was last crawled by google (although some strange things have been happening lately).

BillS, you beat me to it, sorry for double post.

[jnmconsulting]

Amazing, as much as I use google I have never noticed this before... Thank you for the info, most appreciated.

[Marcia]

Mine aren't showing, and they aren't either for a lot of others in the same search that usually have them. Only two do on the first page (there's usually more), and those are Sept. 28th.

I just checked and another one of my sites has a Sept. 29th date - but that site's been updated a lot in the past couple of months, with new pages added to the site, and the other one hasn't been in ages - the site is "stale". I checked a couple of other searches and also found only a sprinkling with fresh dates.

Sometimes the fresh tags go and then reappear all over the place; I haven't heard anyone give an explanation for it, it just seems to go in cycles.