Date In Web Site Title - Optimized Pages Not Indexed

[Coinman]

Hello,
I recently noticed that a competitor includes the current date in the title of his site. This site ranks very well and I am curious if this practice helps.
Also, we have several pages on our sight that are optimized but don't seem to seen by the robots. Our home page is often picked up for these keywords even though (we think) the other pages should score higher. Any comments/suggestions are much appreciated!

[Sabo]

Look, we changed our site optimization.

-Layout
-Keywords
-From tables to pure CSS
-Included the date at the very top of the page.
-etc, etc..

Since this last change (like 3 months ago)our site jumped from #600, #400, #300 in some Google datacenters to #19 in most of the Google datacenters.

I don't know wich of all of our changes are doing this but I'm sure that this change doesn't hurt us at all.

Our site is:
www.ensenada-hotels.com

And the keyword we are targeting is: ensenada mexico hotels

Regards.

[Thunderbuck]

Tricky. The date could certainly be making the site appear more "current", but dynamic content (which this doubtless is) can actually turn off search site web crawlers.

[just-trying-to-help]

Not sure if that is possible script wise, but if they are changing it manually, then they are in fact updating the page every day.

Definitely a + for any website. (keeping the website current).

MSN
Yahoo
CNN
All the news sites, blogs, etc etc.
All updated regularly.
And all do very well in the serps.

Changing one little number every day is all it takes.

[nullvariable]

you might look into this one. If they are using php or some other server side code they could automate this very easily. But Google and other search engines don't read or excute javascript so if the date is generated by javascript its completely useless to them. More likely is the first that it is a server side code. Many sites do this to make the page content seem fresher. I really don't know how Google treats content on dynamic pages differently from that of static pages. Also IMHO I wouldn't think that just the one change of the date would be enough for Google to consider the site updated.

[wednesday]

And what are your competitor's URL and keywords?

[TrafficProducer]

Maybe if you search on a date the site gets listed high, but what about other Keywords?

Google Site Maps use dates and this may this is the best way to boost rank, apart from exchange links.

[marcel]

Interesting... Extremly valuable information...

I hear using external javascript and css improves ranking too.

Originally Posted by Sabo

Look, we changed our site optimization.

-Layout
-Keywords
-From tables to pure CSS
-Included the date at the very top of the page.
-etc, etc..

Since this last change (like 3 months ago)our site jumped from #600, #400, #300 in some Google datacenters to #19 in most of the Google datacenters.

I don't know wich of all of our changes are doing this but I'm sure that this change doesn't hurt us at all.

Our site is:
www.ensenada-hotels.com

And the keyword we are targeting is: ensenada mexico hotels

Regards.

[Coinman]

Thanks to everyone for responding. Our URL is www.mintproducts.com and some of our key words are: coins,gold coins,proof sets,mint sets,2005 silver eagles (for some reason we are always near the top with this one),paper money etc. We will probably give putting in the date a shot. Hopefully we won't be penalized for having a title that's too long!

[Sabo]

We are using the sitemap.xml too...

http://www.ensenada-hotels.com/sitemap.xml

But I don't know if I need to change the <lastmod>2005-06-13</lastmod> regulary or leave it like that.

And about or competitors keyword is: ensenada hotels

other keywords are like: ensenada nightlife, travelling by car to ensenada :S I know, but I'm trying hard...

http://www.google.com/search?q=ensenada+nightlife

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ar+to+ensenada

[web_hosting_world]

Thunderbuck

Tricky. The date could certainly be making the site appear more "current", but dynamic content (which this doubtless is) can actually turn off search site web crawlers.

Dynamic URL can turn the search bots not dynamic pages with simple date included. For example, a php page say, index.php having a date at the top date("Y-M-d") will not turn away any search engine bot.

[brendamalone]

My site has not only the date and time appear automatically, but a greeting also, that is based on the time of day it is. ( http://www.cmha.net )

It is an extension for Dreamweaver, but the script writer has another script for php. (FREE)

I don't know about rankings-because we don't care. We are a government organization and hence, non-profit without any advertising.

This is the javascript that it inserted for me:

</script>
</head>

<body>
<script language="JavaScript">
document.write(doClock("W0","M2","M3","D0"));
</script>

http://www.kaosweaver.com/extensions/index.php?catid=9

[brendamalone]

I also forgot to tell you that I added GOOGLE free Search to all of my pages (except the index page). (www.cmha.net) It's a great search tool, and because we are non-profit, google will not put any ads on the search results. The google bots search my site every two hours so that the search results are accurate. I have noticed that we are ranking #1 in searches for what services we provide in Cleveland.

If your site is for profit, I would still recommend the google search that shows a few discreet ad with search results.

http://www.google.com/services/free.html

It can't hurt to have Google come and crawl your site every two hours!

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by brendamalone

It can't hurt to have Google come and crawl your site every two hours!

It can if you have lots of content and pay for bandwidth. Wow... that could get expensive in a hurry.

Brian.

[brendamalone]

Oh. Never thought about that, but hey, the organization pays for it (prime MS SQL hosting account w/sbc). But for site that I do pay for--oh good grief? Where's the happy medium?

[nullvariable]

My site was crawled something like 2000+ times this month but that only used less than 10Mb so unless you've got a really small account (in which case you don't want more traffic ;) ) you should be fine. Google and other search bots don't do anything other than download your raw html/php pages and evaluate them. They don't download images (or rarely). I would also suggest that you use the search from AdSense. if you have an account you can place that version of the search feature on your site and you get the $$ for any ads that get clicked. That could make up for the extra traffic :)

NV

[brian.mark]

Well... I'd agree that small sites wouldn't care much about the bandwidth Googlebot uses. Our sites get as many as 20,000 pages crawled in a day by each of the 3 main bots, so we're close to 40 GB of bot traffic per month now. That's even with converting most of our site to static HTML pages. They just use a lot of bandwidth for our site, and that's not even close to crawling it every 2 hours. That's closer to every 3 days if they keep that rate up, but they usually only do 1,000 - 2,000 per day, then hit it hard a few times per week.

There is no way we could keep our server up if they crawled every 2 hours. That'd make for almost 500 pages per minute to crawl it every 2 hours. I don't think we have a big enough server to handle that type of traffic. We'd need quite a bit more disk space just to hold the log files. ;-)

Brian.

[nullvariable]

brian.mark,
Excellent point. I failed to consider that as my sites are pretty small comparatively. My suggestion then would be a careful use of robots.txt and make sure that the server has gzip compression enabled as many bots and browsers support this now. The disadvantage being that your older pages would stop showing up for specific searches. It would be a tough line to walk. That said a site this large should bring in enough ad dollars to handle an extra 40Gb and considering the reciprocal nature of search engines I would be hard pressed to use the above method unless my forums were dying :)

[brian.mark]

My real point is that not every site wants or can afford a lot of bot visits. We don't use AdSense, don't use the Google search box (although we've looked at the Google Search Appliance a few times and will probably grab a mini here before long to play with) and make our money the old fashioned way - we sell stuff.

Granted, none of my sites would be considered an average website. We've got products and schematics constantly being added. In one day I have added 50,000 parts and 2,000 schematics. Most sites just don't have that option.

We've all got different needs, so a one-size fits all approach by the bots won't ever work for all of us. Some sites need crawled continually (eBay and news sites for example), but a blog only really needs crawled every few days or once per week / month depending on the activity of the blogger.

Sure, crawling the site every 2 hours is great, but if you don't have several DS-3 lines and a huge dedicated server bank, it's just not possible with a large site.

Anyway, we got off the topic of the dates in the title. The only real use for that I've ever seen is if you want to see how recently your pages were indexed by the engines. Since most of them show a cached date now, that's not a real big issue. Otherwise, it just creates confusion for searchers. If they see yesterday's date (or even days / weeks before) in the title of a site in the search results, is the page still relevant today? Showing the date in the title seems like it's more of a negative than a positive in my book.

Brian.