Fresh dynamic content boosting SERPs

[mike]

WC3, while nice and all, doesn't have quite as much impact on your seo as you might think. I know you're more concerned with dynamic content and whatnot, but I wanted to chime in on the WC3 thing because I know a lot of folks really put a lot of stock into it.

Try running a validation check on google.com.

I'll save you the trouble... It doesn't pass.

See for yourself...

Well, how about CNN?

Nope

ESPN.com?

Not even close.

Surely SearchEngineWatch.com...

Say it aint so!

Yahoo!???

Get the idea?

I've heard reps from both Google and Yahoo say pretty much the same thing. It's great and all but it doesn't neccessarily help or hurt you all that much.

Actually, I don't think it matters a bit.

[DrTandem1]

Content has very little to do with ranking in the Google SERPs. It is mostly IBLs. The IBLs may be weighted by how the site hosting the link is viewed by Google. I can give you examples of sites with content that has not changed in years and are still #1 for very generic terms.

Buying ads from Google also has no impact on the organic SERPs for Google.

Coding has absolutely nothing to do with Google's SERPs, unless the coding is so bad that the page itself is deemed totally invalid.

[Cyclops]

>>>Anyways, I think fresh content is the key, and maybe it's not even changing the content so much as a few lines<<<
That may do the trick, I changed a line on my home page recently and a couple of weeks later some of my terms appeared in the top 20 in Google. That was from absolutely nowhere.
They have since gone back to nowhere but the point is something jolted Google and changing that line was all I had done.
I am now seriously contemplating adding an unobtrusive RSS feed to all my pages.

[Cyclops]

>>>Anyways, I think fresh content is the key, and maybe it's not even changing the content so much as a few lines. <<<
That may do the trick, I changed a line on my home page recently and a couple of weeks later some of my terms appeared in the top 20 in Google. That was from absolutely nowhere.
They have since gone back to nowhere but the point is something jolted Google and changing that line was all I had done.
I am now seriously contemplating adding an unobtrusive RSS feed to all my pages.

[Chatmaster]

The main use of the W3C standards comes into having proper HTML source code for the bots to visit. It does not need to be perfect W3C standards code,... no at all. But the algo and bots as well as the filters that are applied pre and during the algo requires at least an HTML structure that can be understood. Open tags etc. can have some effect on how the page is interpreted by the SE. That is why W3C is help full but NOT required.

As far as the frequent updated content goes. This is a fact and it does play a major role, but I would like to add it goes together with incoming links from other sites that are frequently updated as well. External links to other sites that are frequently updated can also help. Needless to say... Once again it also depends on the industry and or competitiveness of the keyword phrases you are attempting to target. Historical rank and TrustRank seems to be in effect in some way, at the moment, although not entirely according to the registered patent and paper.

[Faglork]

Our online newspaper which is updated several times a day gets spidered almost hourly. In most cases, it takes 2 days to get an article into Google index, and well-ranking, too.

The page is dynamic in nature, but rewritten into .html via mod_rewrite. Needless to say, all pages validate (wonder what that fuzz about that is? It is just correct code, nothing more ...).

We are proud to be the first news source of our region to power the German News section of Yahoo News (Google will add us in a few weeks). The news crawlers are visiting even more frequently. Great way to get your news delivered nationwide, BTW: Locate a regional newspaper which is a source for Google/Yahoo/etc News, and try to submit a PR message. If they publish it, bingo.

To the validation issue: Some days ago a WPW member had his site reviewed and asked why the bots don't see his content. Validation quickly revealed that the markup had a serieous flaw which was ignored by the browsers but stopped the bots dead on the track. Simple validation (yes, simple) will help in such cases.

Thats one point. The other is that many people confuse valid code and clean markup. Right, most pages with clean markup also have valid code, but it needn't be that way. The issue with clean code is that your content does not get buried in gazillion lines of rubbish code. I've seen pages with 30k of code just before the first line of content. AFAIK some spiders will not even go that deep (Can someone confirm that? Or is it a myth?).

One last thing about that W3C issue. It is often stated that it will not help regarding your ranking. That is true, *if* you view it in isolation. Validation *in itself* won't help you a bit. But, nobody goes like "hey, lets validate our pages. Might be fun!". Once you start thinking about valid code, you are opening a sort of pandora's box (in a positive way). You get to think about semantical markup. You get to think about code structure, and how your content is related to that. You get to think about micro-content. And and and ... if you take all this *together*, this is what will help you, because it will change your understanding of your site, and it will change your site.

It makes no sense to take "validation" or, say, "structuring of micro-content" out of this complex process and come to the conclusion "structuring your micro-content will not help you gaining a better position in the SERPs". Such a statement is as true as it is inappropiate.


just my 2c.
faglork

[pagetta]

ths is a very current topic for me as we have a static home page, which was at number one in google for its main few search terms, but is slowly getting taken over by news and PR sites, and other sites that have fresh content. My idea was to, instaed of having news items scrolling in a flash file, to have a php script that randomly generates a news article from a text file.

Will the spider read the home page and then read the text file separately, or will it parse the php code each time it spiders therefore potentially seeing new content every time? How much positive effect would this have for us with regards to fresh content?

Also, isn't the W3C standard there for other reasons, like to produce websites that are accessible to all users on any browser using any sort of software?
I can see how validating keeps clean code which could have some effect with regards to seo, but whether or not it does have any seo effect is regardless, your website should validate for accessibility reasons.

Saying w3c standards 'don't matter a bit' is a bit of a sweeping statement given that laws (in the UK at least) state that your website must be accessible to everyone, and w3c standards go a long way to helping this happen!

[kgun]

DrTandem1 wrote:

Content has very little to do with ranking in the Google SERPs. It is mostly IBLs. The IBLs may be weighted by how the site hosting the link is viewed by Google. I can give you examples of sites with content that has not changed in years and are still #1 for very generic terms.

1. Do you mix Google pagerank and ranking for generic terms on the SERP's, and / or

2. Are the SERP's produced by a two step procedure:
- Potential set of SERP pages.
- In the potential set, ceteris paribus, the pages with highest pagerank are reported (ranked) first?

Is there a new form of content spamming using tools like www dot the-article-system dot com or www dot articlebot dot com?

I repeat my SEO rule written n times here at WPW.

SEO Rule:
Write dynamic quality content with simple, clean code and good headings.

May be better:

Modified SEO Rule:
Make human dynamic quality content with simple, clean code and good headings.

Experiment:
KW: Financial stability

Result in Moss Norway:
The two first result pages has PR 6, the third site PR 5, the next 6, then follows two pages from the Central Bank of Norway, the first with PR 5 and the next with PR 6, then a page (#7) with 0 (zero) PR, then one with PR 5, ....

I will call the #1 page, http://www.fsforum.org/home/home.html a generic (may be canonical is a better word) result. It should be there "independent" of PR and / or new content.

If you use exact match "Financial stability" the page with zero PR trops to #10.

Have I missed something? May be good that I am not in the SEO business.

[CAD]

I dont believe fresh relevant content is the end all solution to top rankings. I believe it is a factor and can help you gain rankings for other key phrase searches.

An example is a competitor of ours that currently ranks #1 on Google for website design;
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...website+design

Killersites.com

A quick look at their landing page will show very little content with the exception of links to inner pages and other websites they own. There is also some google adsense, links out to some prime partners, not a single h1 but several h5 and h4 tags, and oh yeah.... a PR of 7 with 34,400 IBL's.

But, if you are still looking to supplement your overall website offering with fresh relevant content that updates frequently, Scott Harris, who used to work for IEntry who now works for me, created a script called RSStatic that will create the fresh content for you via RSS Feeds. There is a free version available for download, we just ask that you maintain the LINK back to us ;)

pagetta,

You stated that you think there must be come credit for WC3 compliancy and I would have to say I disagree with you. By looking at the top 10 ranking sites for website design, the #1 does not validate and the same goes for about 4 others.

[mike]

Saying w3c standards 'don't matter a bit' is a bit of a sweeping statement given that laws (in the UK at least) state that your website must be accessible to everyone, and w3c standards go a long way to helping this happen!

Well, bear in mind the context of the original post. The subject is SEO/rankings, so I don't have any problems with that being a sweeping statement. So, I'll qualify it with -- In relation to SEO/ranking, WC3 doesn't matter a bit.

However, in terms of browsers etc, I really don't know of any of the current browsers that wont render a page that doesn't validate.

As for it being tied to some accessabilty law, I really think that's got more to do with literal access, meaning you can't restrict access to certain groups of people based on some sort of prejudice etc.

If it has anything to do with WC3 validating these guys have some explaining to do.