Does Google update my site content?

[steve23]

Hi all,

Ok - got something to ask, but kinda feel I should put some sort of 'dumb question' warning up before I do so, it is probalby pretty lame - but here goes:

I have a web site selling widgets for example.

I submit it to Google and the spider things come along and next thing I know, my widgets are showing up in Google searches.

Now - if I continue to add to my site, say I add Woofles to my Widgets - will the Google spiders pick that up and update accordingly?

I suppose what im asking is does Google check back on sites on a regular basis or do i have to do something to get the spiders back - flies possibly!

All the best

Steve (someone who doesnt really know what a 'spider' is but has seen the term on the forum a lot)

:-)

[ken_uk]

The spider is just the term for the bit of software google uses to read the pages on the net, it looks for links, and follows them, grabbing the content along the way...

Googles spiders will re-visit your site, the frequency of how often they visit is determined mainly by how often the site is updated, so if you only update your site once in a blue moon, it will probably take google longer to update than if you update on a regular basis.

[Bathead]

Yes they all come back and visit the site unless you specifically set a rule for them not to. Google likes new content so it wouldn't be able to tell if it didn't regularly crawl the site.

Mick

[WHUK]

If you update your site on regular basis surely bots will revisit your site very often.
Actually if your site is updated daily with fresh content then you can see SE bots are always on your site which will help you and there are great chances for getting your content indexed :)

Also if your site have great number of backlinks then there is good scope for inviting spiders for your site.

[markie]

The spider is just the term for the bit of software google uses to read the pages on the net, it looks for links, and follows them, grabbing the content along the way...

Googles spiders will re-visit your site,


Not trying to be contrary but spider is the name for the process not the device.

Google uses 'bots', short for robots, which is itself a short term for the type of automated scripts that check on websites. The information it collects is passed back to Google making a 'web' of links hence it 'spiders' your site. This is why we have 'spidering'.

It is important to make this distinction so that you can understand that you can help these 'bots' by the use of the meta tags designed for the robots to read (it doesn't affect page rank or search positions per se but it does allow your site to be accurately defined), and you can also select pages of your site that you do not want Google to spider (many sites do this to preserve site structure, hide member pages from common aggregators etc.); the file used for this is called robots.txt and in it you can give instructions to the bots on how to spider your site.

Please note that you can also submit your own maps and information directly to Google using their free business tools and this will help your site appear in the index quicker.

Just follow the business solutions link from any google homepage.

[steve23]

Great stuff!

Thanks for the replies everyone.

All the best

Steve

[ken_uk]

Google tends to refer to googlebot as the 'spider' as in the following google document http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html
where they say

This job is performed by Googlebot, our "spider," which connects to web servers around the world to fetch documents. The crawling program doesn't really roam the web; it instead asks a web server to return a specified web page, then scans that web page for hyperlinks, which provide new documents that are fetched the same way. Our spider gives each retrieved page a number so it can refer to the pages it fetched.

[Steve2507]

Quick piece of advice, set up a blog on your site as G loves blogs and will re-index more often. I set up a blog and saw bot activity double within 2 days.