Is gradual change better for Google?

Does making gradual changes impact the frequency of Google site updates?

[Gr8Writer]

I have a client who wants many revisions done to several pages of his 11-page site. Since freshness is a big part of Google's new algorithm, I see myself has having two options:

1) I could make all the changes at once, regardless of when Google updates the site.

2) I could make the changes gradually, over the course of a week or so to fool Google into thinking that I am continually updating the site, so it would come back to update the site more often.

I know that updating one page continually means that Google updates it more often, but could the same principle work for different pages of the same site?

[jdMorgan]

I'd bet any benefit from doing this would be short-lived at best, and possibly not worth the extra scheduling/coordination effort it might take. A few days after a page "settles down" again, and Googlebot detects no change from the previous visit, it will "demote" that page in revisit frequency.

However, you might be able to benefit from a similar approach to keep the pages fresh if you finish with the re-design just before the deep-crawl and want to keep the fresh page listings showing in Google until the next update three/four weeks later.

With Google, everything is page-related, not site-related. Each page has its own PageRank, and each page's freshbot revisitation schedule is set based upon how often that page changes, among other factors such as PR. The only exception to page-by-page that I know of is a domain-wide ban for spamming.

I don't know what algorithm Google uses to detect fresh pages, but I can vouch for its accuracy - It won't pay attention to minor changes or re-arranges, but it has been amazingly keen at picking up truly-new content on my sites.

Just my observations...

Jim

[Stefan]

My experience is that changing several pages on a regular basis, none of them my intro or main page, is enough to keep the freshbot checking in on most of my site. The pages that 64.68.x.x looks at are PR 5; the two main pages are PR 6.

You could probably make all the changes at once and it wouldn't make any difference. To keep the freshbot interested you'll need to keep at least a couple of pages regularly updated; that might keep the bot looking at the rest of them.

[Gr8Writer]

Jim, thanks for the great idea. I'll let you know how it turns out.

[Marcia]

I have a couple of sites that get a fresh date almost constantly on some pages, and they're never changed. I can't figure why, there has to be something more to it.

[makemetop]

Same here, Marcia. I also have sites with decent PR which have pages which do change almost every day and don't have the freshbot visiting - so what triggers it coming is beyond me!

[Marcia]

MMT, the only clue I have is that one was linked to from the homepage of a site that is changed and freshed frequently, that's when it started on #2. Then the next one (#3) is linked to from the previous (#2) and got started.

It was like a one-two-three chain progression with homepage links in that particular case.

[Stefan]

For all I know I might still get the freshbot if I never changed anything. It always starts on the index page and works it's way through about 70% of the site with what it looks at changing from one time to the next. It usually takes an hour or three, popping in to take a couple of pages at a time.

[vitaplease]

>I have a couple of sites that get a fresh date almost constantly on some pages, and they're never changed. I can't figure why, there has to be something more to it.

My thoughts Marcia;

1. most often they are the pages that get most recent new links towards them.

With me, those are the index page, the sitemap and the feedback page ;)

What the freshbot is trying to say is, hey, this page must be very topical at the moment because its got many new inbound links towards it recently.

2. Also, Google-freshbot could identify some important pages within sites (those with the highest PR and maybe links from DMOZ/Yahoo) that could potentialy have the highest chance of having authorative, new links in them to new (fresh) pages.

Freshbot can only find new content pages, if some page links to them. Biggest chance those are the highest PR pages within the site. Therefore Freshbot must frequently spider these important pages to check for these new links on these pages.