Does Google learn to "expect" fresh content?

[tom.holt]

First off, I'm not a 'Web Pro', but I have spent a good amount of time around this & other forums to get a handle on SEO. As a marketing manager for a financial services firm, I set out to get our new website in as good a position as possible from the start.

Having made sure the bases were covered from a navigation/content/tags etc, I specified a CMS to allow constant addition of new content to the site, as this always seemed one of the main areas for attention.

Long story short, I started adding content on a regular basis (around every day) and sure enough, the site started to climb the SERPs (new content was generally linked to off home page). I remember the site getting as high as p2 on Googles' rankings under the term "Mortgage Network". Then I had a week off. The site fell a long way & has continued to do so, even though I have been making time to add content (though not as frequently as before).

I guess I have two questions. 1) Is there a situation where Google might 'see' that a site is updated very frequently and then penalise that same site when the frequency of these updates drops?. 2) Does Google ever assume that a large volume of frequent updates might be spam in some way?

All content added was original, new & not duplicated. The thing that really kills me is that our competitor's site is never added to & remains at the top of page 1 !!!!!

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Tom
Mortgage Network, Mortgage Support Network, Intermediary Network, Mortgage Broker Network

[wige]

I think it may be one factor. The Googlebot seems to be somewhat intelligent when it comes to new content. For example on my site I get a product feed via XML listing all of our products. Every time a new product becomes available, a new page is created automatically and put into a somewhat buried "unfiled" category of the site. I then log in to the site and add content for that page and move it to the correct area with a 301. Through this method we add about 10-15 new products a day. About a week into using this method, I noticed that Googlebot was checking the obscure, almost unlinked to unfiled index page every 2-4 hours, and crawls the new pages daily. My old pages get crawled about twice a month, but new content is crawled within 1-2 days.

[mjtaylor]

I don't believe your site is being penalized for not having content added at the same rate it was before ... your site may be spidered less, though, but that will not affect the position in the SERPs ... the quantity and quality of the content will, though. AS will the quality and quantity of inlinks.

If a site is new, it is not uncommon to see swings in SERPs - I hesitate to invoke the term that spurs the most debate on this forum, the Google Sandbox, but in my experiece it is not unusual for a new site to rank well for a short time when Google first sees it, and then for it to drop considerably while the site and links to it age.

Speaking of links, I would suggest your next SEO priority would be quality links to your site.

And speaking of new, the current design seems to be new as of February, but there was a website there for a long time - for Thornton Mortgage in 2001, and then for the same company as it is now since 2002, correct? So the design is new ... but not the site ... so while it may seen the Sandbox is not part of the equation, Google does sometimes see any signigicant change as a reason to put a site on the back burner for a while. And it does look as though there are fewer indexed pages now than a couple of years ago.

A lot of your pages seem to be in the supplemental index ... another reason to work on getting links ... and to build more content on your site. There is no "news" on your news page for example (just links to dynamically generated content, it seems), and that page is in the supplemental index ... Not sure where you are putting your new content, but if it's in the news section, I can tell you Google isn't seeing it as worthy of the main index ...

Did I mention you need links?

Hope this helps ...

Cheers, MJ

[tom.holt]

Thanks MJ - As stated, I am pretty low on knowledge when it comes to this stuff, but your suggestion that Google is not seeing the "News" as worthy seems spot-on, as this is where I normally add content. There are a number of other places I can hang updates, but the "News" section is easiest for obvious reasons.

I will have to go back to the drawing board a little on this I think. It just seemed that every time I was adding new "News", our ranking was improving, so I presumed Google liked what we were doing!! I'm not 100% sure what Dynamically generated content is, but the "News" area is added to via a CMS system that I have control over, so it sounds as though there is a fundamental difference in the result pages I am developing to those in the main navigation.

I will show your reply to my web designer & see what we can do. Big thanks for the response.

Tom

[ctabuk]

As a FSA authorised Broker I wish you well with the Keyword 'Mortgage' - I know loads of guys say 'forget meta keywords' - I don't prescribe - so I'd lower the ratio a bit - but that's a personal observation.

Google loves fresh content. I've had newsfeeds live for years and it's never done me any harm. Nice site!

[tom.holt]

Thanks a lot - I'll water them down a little! I am pretty sure now that the content I add is invisible to the spiders given what MJ said above & also due to the fact that a recent automated audit of the home page rendered three 'broken links' which were the links to the news articles..... As stated, I'm unsure as to what dynamic content really is & it's implications for SEO, but I guess my next move will be to see if the CMS system can be tweaked to make any added content fully visible to the spiders.

To think I have been adding this stuff for the last few weeks!!!!

PS - Wige, I definately agree that the constant addition of material seemed to up the frequency of spider visits in the early stages. I imagine this visit frequency can go down as fast as it goes up, otherwise the 'bots' would be very busy.

Thanks again for comment - Tom

[jerrypena1]

Just to shed a little light on the dynamic content question. There are two types of content people talk about, dynamic and static. Another way to describe it is static pages vs. dynamic pages. Static content, or pages, have content that is "hard-coded" somewhere, such as html documents. Everytime you pull up a static page the content doesnt change, or it's static. Dynamic content, or dynamic pages, is what you get when the content is generated by a programming language (online CMS, blog, forum, etc. systems are built using a programming language). If you notice all your news articles are found via the same url "members/story.asp" and the only difference between one article and another is the "id" number that is passed to "story.asp". It's been debated that static pages get higher ranking than dynamic pages and it's not in the search engines best interest to tell us the truth, so who knows for sure. Dynamic content has been around for a long time now, so I doubt that you would get dinged much for it, but again, who knows. I could give you all the reasons that I believe that static pages rank higher than dynamic pages, but it's not my opinion that counts, it's the search engines.

That being said, is also another debateable issue when it comes to dynamic content and it's in the use of search engine friendly links (SFL) to mask the url so it looks like static content. The pages generated by this website use this method. This page in particular is generated by a programming language, but if you notice this page ends with ".html". I've heard valid arguments that it does work and that it doesnt. I certainly dont think it hurts, plus it looks better.

My final comment is to firmly agree with MJ in that getting good inbound links is a big key factor. This is one of the methods Google uses for calculating page rank as do many other search engines.

[Matteo]

Google likes Added Content. If you add content that will make Google happy.
Yahoo likes FRESH content. If you leave a page (especially your index page) static too long you may see a dip in your rankings

[dvduval]

I believe that fresh, unique content can play a contributing role to how well a site ranks. I think it is one factor of many.

[kneelsit]

This is a difficult one. I believe that a great deal of what is said by various website owners SEOs etc. is 95% "accepted wisdom" You can try Plan A and notice a difference and then Plan B and again notice a difference in your position. But the big question still remains Is this change due to your work or due to Google engineers tweaking their algorithms.

I have added links on my site on a basis of a bout 1-2 a month if they seems worthwhile.(I don't go looking, they come to me) I add fresh content maybe once every 6 months at most.

My logs show that Google only crawls at most about 20% of my site - as compared to Inktomi.

Yet despite all this Google still places us at No.1. on the results for our 2 major keyword phrases. I might mention that we came on the net back in 1997 - even this could be a factor.

Greg Designer
Ergonomic, computer chair - Kneelsit - the chair for life!