Hi,

I'm not a techie so please bear with me, I was wondering if anybody had any experience on how the "fresheness" of the content affected results in Google.

We have a library of documents which, when recently launched caused a great deal of traffic to come from Google. This has gradually tailed off and i was wondering if Google starts to down-grade the value of content if it doens't change regularly?

We have recently incorporated the same library into a completey different site and this now gets ranked above the original site despite being live for only one week.

I'd be interested to know if anybody else has seen this kind of problem and if so, how Google decides the content is static and if it can be fooled into seeing it as new.

Cheers

Don't try fooling Google, it's not the way to go and it's not likely to work in the long run.

Google considers the temporal importance of data. Yahoo's labs published an interesting research paper about the temporal strength of queries too. That's getting techie though - the non-techie approach is to do a random Google and notice how some of the links in the results have a date beside them and others don't. The dated links are visited often enough to be worth timestamping.

Is a lack of fresh content bad? It depends. It depends whether your published content should be fresh or not. Clearly archives are unlikely to be fresh. If Google first found your site and assumed you had a whole batch of new news stories I can see how you might start fairly high up the rankings and then slide down. You might also start sliding back up; once your site establishes itself as trustworthy (it's remained on-topic, etc) and as you pick up some inbound links.

The last paragraph assumes your dip in traffic is related to a dip in your Google presence too. That might not be the case.

Thanks for the comments, your idea that the the initial posting of documents could create a surge of referrals would seem to hold water. We are already highly ranked by google (as an 8 on their toolbar) for News so an extra 40k pages would perhaps have that effect.

What is interesting is that our new site has no ranking at all yet the listings appear before the site ranked 8. The content is exactly the same, just more recently posted (and therefore crawled)

The recent dip in traffic is definitely attributable to the downturn in google referrers as we keep a very close eye on it. While not trying to "beat" google, its always worth making sure that we are ahead of the competition!

What is interesting is that our new site has no ranking at all yet the listings appear before the site ranked 8. The content is exactly the same, just more recently posted (and therefore crawled)

Exactly the same? Watch that.

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

If I'm understanding correctly, you should put a 301 permanent redirect from your old website to your new website. This will successfully transfer the PageRank to the new website. It will also mean that your visitors get immediately to the right place.

The only downside is that it is not clear that Yahoo! or Inktomi handle 301's correctly yet.

Yes Google gives credit for fresh content... they see it as up-to-date information... thus the popularity of blogs... but if you can rework your pages the spiders will recognize that changes are being made regularly and come back more often and give a little boost for the efforts...

I have not seen any evidence that a site will "rank better" just because the content changes on a frequent basis. Having your content change frequently will encourage more frequent crawls by Google but I have not seen any direct positioning benefits. If they did reward sites that “change frequently” then it would simply be another avenue that spammers could easily abuse.

I have a home page that changes almost daily and thus gets spidered by Google almost daily. So if I have another web page that I want to be picked up rapidly by Google, for example, the latest monthly newsletter, then I put a link from the home page and the new newsletter is indexed rapidly too.