Does Randomizing Content Help Search Rankings Or Hurt Rankings?

Nov 24, 2008 - 7:55 am 0 by

A Google Groups thread has a webmaster asking if it helps for him to rotate content on his site. He believes it might help for three reasons:

  1. Revised content will encourage GoogleBot to recrawl his pages more often.
  2. Revised content makes the pages look newer, which may help improve rankings.
  3. It can't hurt to do, so why not.

Are any of these reasons a valid reason to rotate content on a page? Nope. You really need to think if rotating content on a page refresh will help or hurt your conversions. GoogleBot is often smart enough to tell how much of the page's true content is changing versus a snippet of weather data, testimonials or so on.

Googler, JohnMu, said "the use of random testimonials most likely won't make or break your site." John then goes on to explain how certain ways this guy's site was built can be improved. But that doesn't touch on the heart of the question.

We discussed this twice before. Most recently in May 2007 with Does Rotating Content Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings? and a while back in September 2004 with Dynamic Content on Static URLs - Rotation of Content.

The potential to confuse your end user by not showing content on a refresh can be huge. So knowing what to rotate on refresh is very important.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: January 17, 2025

Jan 17, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Search Volatility Cooling, AI Overviews Penalties, Maps Pin Hack Fix, Search Market Share & More

Jan 17, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Ads

Scary Google Ads Phishing Scam

Jan 17, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Search Max Coming Soon?

Jan 17, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Updates Examples Of Events & Estimated Salary Images In Structured Data Docs

Jan 17, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Testing AI Generated What People Are Saying

Jan 17, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Is Microsoft Live Search Crawling More But Indexing Less?