Hi Did Google Spider Yesterday?

Do the dates next to a new or refreshed listing...

[AllEars]

Hello, this is my first post and I'm getting my Google sea legs , albeit not without some trial by fire.

Some listings that regularly appear under a term to which I'm admittedly striving to achieve high page rank are consistently beating me to the top 10, and many have shown the date Novemeber 23, 2002,(yesterday)by them.

What do these dates mean? And why doesn't my listing show a date, even when I had updated my site with fresh links and content about 3 days ago? I'm concerned that if Google did send a bot out to index yesterday, that my site was missed because my ISP had me down for 3 1/2 hours yesterday morning. If Google did send a bot out yesterday, and I was missed then do I wait another 3-4 weeks?

Please bear with my lack of jargon and expertise. As I am "All Ears" to suggestions.

[jdMorgan]

AllEars,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

You are seeing the effect of Google's "fresh-bot". This 'bot looks for often-updated and new pages on sites it knows about. Having your server down and missing the fresh-bot is not a big deal. An outage during the monthly deep-crawl can be disastrous.

Pages which are spidered by the fresh-bot get a date listed along with their URL in the SERPs. If your page listing doesn't have a date, then your page was not "freshed".

You might want to do a WebmasterWorld site search for the phrases "fresh bot" and "everflux" for some enlightening reading.

HTH,
Jim

[puzzled]

i wonder how google decides, when to send fresh-bot.

yesterday and today the bot visited my site. at the moment i'm building up my site, every changes i made was seen a day or two later in the search results.

does building your site and upload it as soon as possible and upload ervery little changes attract googlebot?

[AllEars]

Thanks JDMorgan, your reply was very helpful. Do you know when Google does it's "deep crawl"? Would it be the 29th or the 30th of every month?

[europeforvisitors]

Puzzled wrote:

i wonder how google decides, when to send fresh-bot.

Google isn't saying, but PageRank is likely to be a factor. I don't think it happens because of constant page updates. My home page gets changed only a few times per month, on the average, but I average 300-400 hits a day from Googlebot, and new pages that I link to from the home page make it into the Google "fresh" index within a day or two.

[jdMorgan]

AllEars,

Would it be the 29th or the 30th of every month?

The schedule varies. They do it whenever they feel like it [webmasterworld.com] from what we can tell. Groundhog's shadows might even be involved in the scheduling decisions... Usually near the end of the month or the beginning of the next month.

Jim

[puzzled]

europeforvisitors: my index-page has only pr 3 all inner pages have pr1.

so, the pages don't have very high pr to get visited daily by googlebot.