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Do Search Engines read the Time/Date Stamp

 
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AmericanEdge



Posts: 976

PostPosted: Thu May 27, 2010 2:28 pm    Post subject: Do Search Engines read the Time/Date Stamp Reply with quote

Much has been said about fresh content being the way to improve search engine ranking for our stores.

I don't have a clue about how such things work.

For those who know about such things:
Do Search Engines read the Time/Date stamp in the lower left hand corner of each page in our stores and is it relevant to search ranking?


ralph
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aspencounty



Posts: 815

PostPosted: Thu May 27, 2010 4:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

AmericanEdge wrote:
Much has been said about fresh content being the way to improve search engine ranking for our stores.

For those who know about such things:

Do Search Engines read the Time/Date stamp in the lower left hand corner of each page in our stores and is it relevant to search ranking?


ralph


Short answer is no. While the time/date will be read, the change in time and date will have no affect on rankings or when and how often your pages get crawled.

A very brief description using Google as an example; it sends out it's bot which discovers one of your pages and carries it back to be indexed. At some later time the bot returns to the page and if it is exactly the same as the last visit it just leaves. There is no reason for it to re-index a page it already has. When the bot comes back yet again and still no changes it will move on looking for something "new".

After doing this for a period the bot will begin to visit your page less frequently or in extreme cases may stop altogether. When talking about fresh content, this is offering something new to keep the bots "interested" and coming back for more. I have talked about content a lot myself but but in all honesty, this applies mainly to sites like blogs or other info type website where you routinely add new articles, news and other stuff.

The problem with e commerce sites like our Ecrater stores is they typically have hundreds or even thousands of products and it impossible to change content all the time. What I mean by this is you are most likely not going to have the time or inclination to go in an change your descriptions every day/week/month. I do advise folks to try and change their home page content from time to time but even this is hard to do. After all there are only so many way to describe a store and it's content.

If you are interested, there are tools that will show the last time a site/page was visited by search engine bots or you can look at the cached date of a page and get a good idea the last time it was visited and updated.
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AmericanEdge



Posts: 976

PostPosted: Thu May 27, 2010 7:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aspencounty,

Thank you for your time explaining this. Just something I wondered about for some time and never got around to asking.

I always read what you have to say in your posts and find them to be very informative.

A good evening to all
ralph
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