Fresh Content

How much to keep the spiders coming back?

[yowza]

I've read in several places that it is good to have content that changes every day. Some articles say that a small change like the current date will keep the robots coming back.

Will the date suffice? How much content should change?

For an ecommerce site I am designing I currently have the date and one word in a paragraph that change dynamically. The word changes every 15 seconds to one of four rotating words.

My homepage changes drastically, dynamically. However, for the deeper content pages, are the above changes enough?

[troels nybo nielsen]

My own experiences seem to suggest that a page must basically have two qualities in order to keep it "fresh" in a search engine:

1. The page must be considered sufficiently "important" by the search engine. This is mainly about the number and "importance" of its incoming links. (In Google terms: PageRank). Don't expect anybody to tell you where the lower limit is, but my personal guess would be that you at least need a PR4.

2. The page must be found in several visits by bots to be frequently updated. And those updates must be considered to have enough significance. Once again: Don't expect anybody to tell you about any exact limits, but I tend to believe that the changes you mention are too small.

There seems to be some interaction between those two points. My experiences suggest that an "important" page needs smaller and less frequent changes to stay "fresh" in the index.

[layer8]

Obsessed with getting better and better rankings, I went down the road of must update each day.

This got me spidered every day but did not do anything for my positioning.

I give up on the whole SEO thing and 2 months later my site is coming up first for a lot of keywords. I did not make any changes to the page and now my site is fresh!

Good SEO is like making great wine, once you make your brew you need to let it mature!