That would be brilliant but there would still be debates as people would have different views on things and only a little time would be able to be spent looking at a website, but they cant win really (doing a dam good job though!)

Hi there

Didnt realise what i had started here lol, i think there is a world of difference between just jigging a few words around and actually updating a page and puttin relevant content on a page, i think i agree with the previous post it sounds like its a balance between the 2.

I have seen some people once they get a good ranking they are so scared to alter any text on the page in case they have a sudden drop in ranking, surely thats a bad thing and bad for the internet in general.

I just wondered if google engine recognised this fact.

Woc

Originally Posted by usearchme

I have seen some people once they get a good ranking they are so scared to alter any text on the page in case they have a sudden drop in ranking, surely thats a bad thing and bad for the internet in general.

This is true. Stagnation is bad for everyone, and fear is bad for webmasters.

I'd like to give Hirst props for "I have read it many times. It was written 12 years ago and Google has had many many major changes since then." We can always count on him to be a voice of sanity and reason.

I'd like to give Hirst props for "I have read it many times. It was written 12 years ago and Google has had many many major changes since then." We can always count on him to be a voice of sanity and reason

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Thats not nessesarily true within this aspect. Google has had significant changes, however there outlook at that time is very advanced for such a small search engine and i cant really see a way that the situation can be improved other than keeping an eye on updating of data. I am however not saying that the way they keep and eye on updating data or detecting if content needs to be updated regularly, could be improved during this time, im simply saying that i belive the concept to be the same.

Originally Posted by mmggaa

That would be brilliant but there would still be debates as people would have different views on things and only a little time would be able to be spent looking at a website, but they cant win really (doing a dam good job though!)

True enough...

You can't please all of the people all of the time, but it could have a positive impact, (at least from the point of view of helping make the web more user friendly).

Most folks can't stand ad farms and flashing banners, but wading through a swamp of incoherent keywords is no picnic either.

This just cant happen becuase search engines arent people and cant look at websites and see if its good for users, so they try and see if its good for users my picking keywords, giving weights to words, anchor texts etc etc and by the frequency of updates (dependent apon the subject if updates are needed!)

They don't need to analyse the page to see if it's good for users, they only need to return a document that is relevant to the current query when real people are searching.
Webmasters, SEOs etc tend not to search like "real" people do, we search like bots do and use a few keywords to see where the pages from a site we are interested in happens to rank.
The upshot of this is, the Google SERP position isn't always totally dependant on what words we put into a page, or how many times they are crammed in there, Google is steadily becoming a natural language search engine so it is more dependant on the users query. Therefore how we put those words into the page comes into play more. Using the (key)words in a natural way including the (so called) "stop" words is going to make your page more relevant to the way that users search.
So how you write your copy is going to depend on the target audience.

BTW. Simply scoring the page on word count and simplistic algos for weighting on embolding, proper case, headings etc went out with AltaVista (although MSN shows some vestiges of this) .


Back to the updating topic,

I have yet to see any kind of evidence that updating on a regular basis makes any difference to anything. One site I run has had no changes at all in the past 18 months because there is nothing to change, the product is the same, the very narrow target market is the same.
This however has not reduced the crawl rate, not reduced the rankings and has not made a difference to the traffic & enquiries it gets.

I'll see if any changes happen in the next few months as the product has been substantially expanded to increase the target market, so an update is on the cards. Though I do expect it to make a difference to traffic as there will be several new pages for the extra targets.

The other thing to consider is of course there is no reliable mechanism outside of the SEs own datacentres to determine when or even if a page has been updated.
The HTTP Last-Modified header can be spoofed and does not always exist in the response headers
Even the HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response is not reliable as pages created by code will always return 200

Originally Posted by chrishirst

...Google is steadily becoming a natural language search engine so it is more dependant on the users query. Therefore how we put those words into the page comes into play more. Using the (key)words in a natural way including the (so called) "stop" words is going to make your page more relevant to the way that users search.

For the benefit of us 'noobs,' could you possibly elaborate on the so called "stop" words? Perhaps something in the form of an example sentence or two?

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful reply.

"stop" words are usually taken to be the common sentence construction words, such as;
if, at, is, for, then, the, in, of, etc

The general idea being that using these words didn't detract from getting rankings for two disparate words or alter the results when used in a user query. But it doesn't always work like that anymore (if it ever really did) and the SEs query engines (especially Google's) are pretty good at applying grammatical rules and understanding when a "stop" word would modify a query. So if proper grammar and sentences are used for a query the results can sometimes be very different.