Tricking Googlebot on a dynamic site

to make it think your pages are fresh

[JuDDer]

This is a question I've been pondering for a while, and I'd be interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on it.

There's lots of talk about updating your pages to try and get and keep them 'freshed' by Googlebot. In this [webmasterworld.com] thread, soapystar mentioned the possibility that "if you replace everything with a new creation date it thinks you are playing games....then chucks you out"

Say you have a totally database generated site. The content could be continually changing but Googlebot won't see it as fresh content as the last modified date will still be the same as when the page(s) were first published.

I've been running a script to open then save my files back to the server to get the last modified date stamp changed to reflect that the content has changed.

The content does genuinely change constantly, but could people using this kind of technique be heading for a penalty?

Does anybody know if googlebot just looks at the last modified date or if it actually compares the newly fetched file with an existing one to see if there's any changes?

[mat]

I THINK Google must run sort of checksum on the 'weight' of the source-code in order to determine whether or not page content has changed significantly.
Our site, despite being reasonably large, with new 'products' being added almost daily, never really saw much change on the index page - the index linked off to the 'sections' and it was within those that the content was being added. We recently added a small PHP call to the front page that pulled the 10 most recent additions from a database, stuck them in a table and gave that table a random heading from a small dB of phrases.
Bingo - 2 days later we had a Fresh tag, and the date on that has been updated pretty much every two days since then. Prior to this, and for the last year or so, we had another small PHP call that simply displayed the local time. Clearly this would have resulted in a one or two byte change in the source code each time Googlebot came by, but it wasn't enough - and rightly so - to trigger a Fresh tag.

That's my take on things, anyways. Mat