The fresh content game

Wait for Deepbot or beat Freshbot?

[Roel]

Hi guys
OK - here's the challenge:

You have 100 static HTML pages on your PR4 site. They get indexed by Freshbot and bam! 500 unique visitors per day from Google.

After 20 days: bam! you now got 0 unique visitors per day because Freshbot dropped you.

What do you do?

1) Wait for Deepbot to index and rank you (knowing that your rankings might be actually lower than Freshbot).
2) If it was only a 5 minute job, change all your filenames and internal links and re-upload the new pages. You leave the old pages in place so that if people visit them they will see the page, but no links are pointing to them anymore. This in the hope that Freshbot will pick up the new pages and give you 500 unique's again (the keywords of the new pages are the same as the old pages).
3) You start link building like crazy so that when Deepbot indexes your site you will rank higher because of the new links.
4) You make changes to your HTML files every day so that the pages are always "fresh" in the hope of getting ranked by Freshbot again (although they are still the same filenames etc.)
5) You start worrying like crazy because you have just lost all your income (again) and decide that SEO is not really a game for you.

[tantalus]

I'm really tempted to say 5)...

My advice... 1)

Why would your rankings be actually lower? I don't understand where your coming from on that one.

Going from 500 referals to zero though, smacks of a penalty.

[WebFusion]

Going from 500 referals to zero though, smacks of a penalty.

Not if these were new pages that haven;t been deep carawled yet. Give it 45-60 days or so.

5) You start worrying like crazy because you have just lost all your income (again) and decide that SEO is not really a game for you.

If all your income relies on staying in the good graces of the engines (i.e. 100% free search engine traffic), you're right - this "game" is ont for you.

Diversify your traffic sources and sleep better at night. If you site converts visitors to buyers (I'm assuming this is a commercial site), then it won;t matter where the traffic comes from (PPC, other ads), you'll still make money.

[caveman]

Roel, you must work a helluva lot faster than I do.

I'll stick with the steady growth approach. Fast and dizzy is not for me. Except after hours of course. :-)

[mark1615]

This thread actually goes to an ongoing question of mine - How does G balance its appetite for fresh content with what most people believe is its sandboxing of new sites and/or new pages. I haven't seen new pages come up in G for awhile.

[RobBroekhuis]

Please forgive my ignorance - is there actually such a thing as freshbot and deepbot (two distinct Googlebot algos, I assume), or is it a sliding scale? I wonder about similar things, after Google dropped most of my interior pages (where all the in-depth info is) several months ago. Now Gbot is down to fetching the index page regularly, and a few top-level pages every few days or so. Last time my deeper-down pages were crawled was about a month ago, and they were never indexed. Can I do anything to lure "deepbot"?