Keeping Google Interested In Your Content

An important question was posed to Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help today…

“Say your index page has been cached by Google and you then you change the meta description. How long does it take for a Google bot to recrawl that page? Or must your request it via Webmaster Tools?”

So this is addressing caching of pages by Google, which is a very important determinant of how authoritative Google views your domain or specific pages. A higher frequency of caching means that your site is important enough for Google come back and crawl it more often than not. If it takes six weeks between cache dates on a page then you can safely say that Google finds the page stale and possibly not relevant anymore (time/freshness factor) or that the page is not as valuable to visitors. Eventually cache dates will get further and further apart, and then the page will fall into a supplemental index which is like being a second class citizen in Google’s world.

How does one avoid falling into supplemental oblivion? Well, let’s first examine Mr. Cutts response…

“There are a few cases where if we haven’t seen the content change the last eighteen times that we visited then maybe the nineteenth time we’ll wait even longer (between caches/indexing). But in general when there’s regular content, and in our opinion that’s important content…”

Now what constitutes “important” content in the eyes of Google?

“…we’ll generally try to revisit that page often to see whether it’s changed or whether there is any new information on it.”

A good blog post with a high level of engagement (comments) is a great example of new information being added to a page. This should attract Google to cache the post more often. This is why getting your constituents to engage with your content is critical in establishing authority within Google.

“But if the page hasn’t changed in a while (no fresh content/ discussions), or the page doesn’t have a high Page Rank, then it can take longer to cache.”

And there it is, Page Rank! Page Rank is not the end all be all measure of authority by any means (at least not the Page Rank we see). This is proven in many instances where a page with a lower Page Rank will rank above a page with a higher Page Rank. A truer metric of rankings is Google’s internal, secret Page Rank that no one can or ever will see. Google uses it to calculate authority of a given page, and this calculation is almost entirely based on linking, or the various sites that are linking to YOUR page(s).

SUMMARRY

There are two things that can increase the caching/indexing of your pages; fresh content and links.

Now when Google says fresh content this doesn’t necessarily mean that the content has to update every day or even every week. But if Google crawls a page a bunch of times, over a few months probably, and sees no changes to content, it will stop crawling the page as often to focus on other relevant pages with newer content. So adding new content or tweaking the existing content on your pages every so often is a good idea, especially to keep the content updated with the times. Google is placing a great deal of emphasis on time and dates of pages lately too. There is just no need to obsess over it on a weekly basis. I suggest refreshing your most important pages every few months to keep them current. Ultimately this should please your visitors and the search engines. And after all, that is what search engine optimization is all about!

The other thing that can keep your pages popular with Google are links, the equity of Page Rank and ultimately rankings. Links, like fresh content, send a signal to Google that other people find your page(s) useful, fresh, and relevant. Google figures that if other pages are still linking to your content then it must be of some use or importance. A steady growth of new links to your most important pages will help ensure that they stay at the forefront. It does not have to a large amount of links, and it can even come in the form of blog comments from relevant sites or social media sites.

THE FUTURE

A few things have not been specifically addressed here. Is social media a factor? So for instance if a page is referenced in Twitter, will that increase Google perception of authority, relevance, and freshness?

And are engagement stats like CTR (click-thru rate), time on site, and/or bounce rate being factored into Google’s perceived authority of a page?

I would love to hear everyone chime in with comments on these two things and let me know what you think of social media and engagements stats and their role in page authority, if any, at the moment!