If I place a link on my business’ home page to my weblog and then make sure to update my weblog frequently, will the “Googlebot” come a-knockin’ on my home page just as frequently as my blog?
The reason I ask is because in your book Growing Your Business with Google you indicate that Google cares about pages, not sites. This seems to suggest to me that if I update my blog frequently, Google will come to my blog page frequently, but not to my site.
The answer is that you really need to realize that Google views every page of a Web site as an autonomous entity, so if you have pages that aren’t updated for months at a time, they’ll only be spidered infrequently, whereas pages that are updated every day or two (e.g., a weblog, etc) can end up being spidered every day.
From an efficiency perspective, this makes a lot of sense: one of the goals of a spider is to visit as infrequently as possible while still ensuring that the search engine database has the most recent copies of all Web pages possible.
That’s one reason why you need to pollinate your content changes throughout your site. On my Intuitive Life Business Blog site, for example, every page has a “latest entries” box which changes each time a page is added to the weblog. On the home page for my Intuitive Systems site — http://www.intuitive.com/ — you’ll notice that I actually slip in the titles of the two most recent entries from my three main weblogs, meaning that the page content changes a couple of times a day sometimes!
Brief geeky interlude: this is accomplished through server-side includes (SSI) and a custom Movable Type template in my weblog tool.
Search engines like content that’s fresh, so that index page is spidered quite frequently (in fact, a measurable percentage of my server’s bandwidth goes to search engine spiders!)
What I suggest you need to do is figure out a way that when you update your weblog, something can change on the other pages on your site, esp. your home page. Then have a bit of patience and you’ll find that all of the pages on your site are being spidered every day or two.
Hope that helps clarify things.
I was just looking at my tracking software and I had Google US visit 4 times in an hour and google France twice, is why I’m searching what this means. Thanks for the peace of mind.
Yes, google loves fresh content but I have noticed that if you have google analytics it may be signaling google that new content is on the site. I had a site that hadn’t been visited by google for months, as soon as I revamped the site, googlebot was there within 2 days.
Google love’s fresh content, using blogs you can meet the same purpose and it can be considered as the best way to attract spiders. most webmaster try to have blogs in their website and work hard to update it’s content regularly.
You should use XML sitemap to inform the spiders about the updates and changes of your blog.
Great book Dave. I hope you are right!
Ken