Rotating 3 or 4 different paragraphs on my home page

[spenland]

I'm looking to create a script of some sort that would rotate 3 different paragraphs on the home page of my website.

Basically everytime the page loads or reloads, 4 different paragraphs will be randomly shown. A few questions regarding this.

1) Is this type of script considered "black hat" seo since the basic purpose would be to increase my search engine ranking.

2) Do search engines even see anything inside <script> tags?

3)Is there a way to get text to randomly rotate in this manner while getting a boost in SEO and not being considered a spammer?

Thanks guys!

[Duncan Pollock]

Whether you're going to be seen as a black hatter or a spammer or whatever -- or not -- it seems to me that you'll certainly end up confusing your viewers, not to mention the search engines.
In fact, I can't imagine any scenario where you'd want -- or it would even make sense -- to "ring the changes." I'm not sure if you're talking about your "Turning things into a profit center" site or something else, but trying to be one thing to people today and something else to them tomorrow doesn't sound like a well thought out marketing plan.
If you have a variety of services available for a range of different people, all you need is a website that's designed to serve them all by a series of links "about this," "about that," and "about the other."
A business can be run on the basis of being all things to all people, but it has to have a focus and this, in my opinion, has to be a rock solid home page instead of one in which, as it were, the sand is always shifting.

Duncan

[williamc]

we routinely rotate paragraphs at first to get a feel for which one improves rankings better. This is done bi-monthly tho. It's a matter of not only rotating copy in different places, but also watching which copy is displayed for which week, and the traffic and keyword counts you are getting rtaffic from which engines.

Other than that it would be just confusing to your visitors as duncan said above doing it daily. Unless it is like a daily tip or trick or something along those lines that you are rotating.

[DrTandem1]

It's not black hat and it would not increase your ranking in the SERPs.

If it's a PHP script, it doesn't have to reside on the page that is displaying the rotating paragraphs. So, looking inside the script tag is irrelevant.

Doing what you are planning is not spamming and it is done all the time. Most commonly for quotes.

[Cyclops]

Would placing an RSS feed on the page have the desired result....I am asking as I am thinking about placing an RSS feed on every page of my site.
The idea is to keep the content fresh which should make Google happy.

[Faglork]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

Would placing an RSS feed on the page have the desired result....I am asking as I am thinking about placing an RSS feed on every page of my site.
The idea is to keep the content fresh which should make Google happy.

Happy Google, unhappy visitors? If it does not make any sense for your visitors, don't do it. Also consider that RSS Feed Links are outbound links, so if you plaster your pages with feed links, the visitors get way too much chances to leave your site.

Unless you don't plan a spam site existing only for driving in traffic to display ads, IMO this is not a good idea.

faglork

[eightfifteen]

There is a script available for Adobe GoLive called Random Text. I don't know what you are using, but if there is that, then there is probably a regular java script already made, waiting for you to download and plug in to your site.

[DrTandem1]

I agree with Faglork. Besides, Google is not interested much in content these days beyond supplying AdSense ads. They are far more interested in IBLs.

[spenland]

thanks for the advice. I believe WilliamC hit on the head pretty much exactly what I'm trying to do. Experiment with different phrased paragraphs to determine the best combination for the search engines. I think rotating them every week manually may be the best idea as I don't want to confuse the search engines.

Plus I can't seem to find a way to do it without placing it inside a php or java script tag, which pretty much everyone agrees that search engines skip anyway.

[williamc]

Originally Posted by spenland

thanks for the advice. I believe WilliamC hit on the head pretty much exactly what I'm trying to do. Experiment with different phrased paragraphs to determine the best combination for the search engines. I think rotating them every week manually may be the best idea as I don't want to confuse the search engines.

Plus I can't seem to find a way to do it without placing it inside a php or java script tag, which pretty much everyone agrees that search engines skip anyway.

If they are put into a mysql database it is as simple as this in php:

<?php
  $db = @mysql_connect('localhost', 'dbuser', 'dbpass');
  @mysql_select_db('dbname', $db);

  $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM paragraphs order by RAND() limit 1", $db);
  $myrow = mysql_fetch_array($result;
  echo $paragraph;
?>

The above is just a randomizer, but you could easily add to it to make it use a certain one for a whole week. Once a week pull one at random from the database via crontab scheduler, save to file, and read in that file on visitor calls.

As I said above though, I would also add code that tracks which one is being used at any given time.

[DrTandem1]

Originally Posted by spenland

thanks for the advice. I believe WilliamC hit on the head pretty much exactly what I'm trying to do. Experiment with different phrased paragraphs to determine the best combination for the search engines. I think rotating them every week manually may be the best idea as I don't want to confuse the search engines.

Unfortunately That is not what you said in your original post:

Originally Posted by spenland

Basically everytime the page loads or reloads, 4 different paragraphs will be randomly shown. A few questions regarding this.

[freehits]

Originally Posted by spenland

Plus I can't seem to find a way to do it without placing it inside a php or java script tag, which pretty much everyone agrees that search engines skip anyway.

Placing it inside of a PHP tag would be exactly the same as pure html, While no expert....PHP is not viewed like a JS file but becomes flat html before it is even evaluated by the SE.

I did this same thing long ago using the randomizer SNIPPET williamc shows you there above.

You could also incorporate a variable generated from

http://us3.php.net/date

the 'day number in the month' or 'week number in the year' to rotate the included file of text based on what day it is weekly/monthly or whatever.