SEO Difference of opinion

[khalid]

Hi all,

I'm quite versed in SEO and do alright online ranking websites and what not.

Today I had a chat with a guy who has a site that rotates the front page text and images on every page load.

I asked him if he was doing split testing for conversion rates to which he replied "no Google likes fresh content."

Whilst that statement is correct surely continually loading a complete different set of text/keypharses etc on every page load would be to your detriment?

Thoughts anyone?

 

[AlienAlien is verified member.]

Interesting - just a related thought, don't online forum boards do this exact same thing with their use of ever changing dynamic content on some main pages (very busy ones can 'change content' every minute or less!).

 

[EdwinEdwin is verified member.]

Years ago it was suggested that the Linux "touch" command could be used periodically on the index.html file (or equivalent) to make it look newer, but Google got more sophisticated.

I'd expect somewhere in the thousands of sections of the Google algorithm, there's something that says "If the homepage has changed, has it changed to a previous version of itself, and if so how old is that version" precisely to spot sites that flip between 2-N different front pages all the time. That would catch those trying to exploit the "trick" while giving a free pass to news sites which have DIFFERENT content on the FP each time...

 

[Blossom]

Fresh content on that level of 'recency' is more relevant for news sites really (at least at the moment). The average informational website won't benefit from that kind of rotation, not to mention it could be pretty confusing from a user perspective.

If it's different keyword targeting, then yes it could potentially cause all kinds of problems.

And it will play havoc with outbound links as well.

 

[khalid]

I guess news sites and forums change all the time but the old content is still there.

The way this guy was doing it was a complete change of everything hence why I thought it was bad.

 

[DaveLeedsDaveLeeds is verified member.]

and along will come that clever algorithm chap from google...........

 

[Aegean]

On some of my sites the frontpage content doesn't change with every pageload, but it does change with every update (so every day), in 3 different places in the homepage.

Google loves this as frontpage text-link updates to fresh relevant content are exactly what it's looking for. Hence my site went straight to number one.It's not the only reason of course, but its one of them.