Are You Using The Google Cache Checking Tool?

Often in my SEO Consultant role I come across situations where you have to give evidence as to why it's advantageous to create fresh/automatic content on your sites to ensure that GoogleBot et al come a knocking often.

They're usual response when I put the case is "why does it matter"?

My answer is: "When you provide a new product or service, you want people at your door ready to buy". But how is this so?

Well the more often you add/change content, the more often the bots will come round to see what you've got. When you really need to get a new product in front of potential purchasers you'll need the bots round ASAP.

I've seen this recently with a client who has many pages that change very infrequently. We've recently started the process of SEO'ing them and getting new content on there. But because they change very infrequently the new changes will take a fair while to kick in.

But why this ramble? Well there's a tool out there to show you (and your clients if you have them) how often GoogleBot comes round.

The tool is created by We Build Pages and is called Cool Cache.

Basically you give it a url (probably your homepage) and it'll see what onsite links you have and then when you press "go" it'll go through them and tell you when the last cached date is.

This should highlight to you the pages that you need to work on to get fresh/automatically updated content on.

Go to these pages and work out if you can get some external news feeds or can embed various forms of internal information such as "latest products" or "latest company news" etc.

You'll be amazed what impact it can have!

Well one learning is that if you look at this site, many of the "labels" pages were crawled and cached today, however the homepage is a week-old and the post about a Google Page Rank update doesn't have a cache - wierd!