Shawn Hogan runs digitalpoint – a collection of web services and a webmasters forum. I’ve dubious honor of being member #29 so I’ve been hanging around there for a bit.
Shawn has implemented a number of free tools which are awesome, especially his keyword tracker. This post, however is about the blog listings that he has on every post.
On face value it appears that I’m the winner. I get an extra link to my post, more traffic and more people can read about what’s important to me. It’s all good.
But consider what happens to those dead old posts that nobody adds to anymore. They’ve served their purpose and now they just lie there quietly, taking up space in the database. Every so often Googlebot, msnbot, et al, will trundle through and look to see if they have changed. If they haven’t changed then it won’t visit again for a while, if they have then it will return sooner.
So what happens when I post to my blog — that old thread gets updated. The bots think there is new content (after all very little has to change) and make a note to revisit. The number of updating pages on Digitalpoint increases as there are now very few seemingly stale pages and each day hundreds of new threads are started.
Ofcourse, if every forum starts doing this then no doubt Google will start checking to see if the url has changed, or just the anchor text and we’ll be busted but not every webmaster will be motivated enough, or understand the SEO implications well enough. So, if you run a forum, I’d recommend adding this type of functionality. It’s a Win:Win situation.
Just don’t ask Shawn for his code 😉
see this post too: Dates on Google Sitemaps
Another forum using different code but the same concept.
VBulletin Webmaster
A key difference with this forum is that it doesn’t link to the forum homepage but to the specific blog entry giving a deeplink.
[…] I’ve already mentioned here how much I liked the technique used at Digitalpoint for making pages appear fresh. […]