How do I get my site cached more regularly?

October 2, 2008

One of the more common questions people have when they’re trying to get their website ranked higher in Google SERPs is how they can get their website cached more frequently. This relates to Google’s crawl rate of your website. Getting Google to index your website more frequently is a challenge that regular SEO isn’t able to help with, as Google indexes websites that are updated regularly, rather than websites that left untouched for months at a time.

In short, Google has become the most dominant search engine by providing users with the most relevant results to their queries; therefore people came back to Google because they knew they’d find what they were looking for quickly and easily. Other search engines, including Yahoo! and MSN (now Live.com) are less able to provide relevant results (and as a consequence are easier to fool by heavy handed SEO techniques).

Therefore, to ensure that Google returns your website at the top of the SERPs, and to make sure that your website is indexed and cached more frequently, you need to make your website exactly what Google is looking for; by making your website the most relevant and informative source for information relating to your industry.

You’ll notice when Googling keywords relating to your industry, keywords that you’d like to rank for yourself, that the sites at the top of the SERPs tend to be big websites with considerably more pages that their competitors. For example, many searches bring up the usual players such as Wikipedia.org at the top of Google, because Wikipedia is based around the notion that content is king. Wikipedia is updated every minute, with the pages and new content being added constantly. You don’t need to beat Wikipedia at its own game; you simply need to take a leaf out of its encyclopaedia. By updating your website every day with unique, interesting and informative content you’ll encourage Google to return more frequently.

Google likes websites that are updated regularly. Make your website what Google is looking for, what Google’s users are looking for, and you’ll be rewarded with traffic and rankings from Google.

Darren
Senior Creative Developer

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2 Comments

  1. Darren

    The option that I use and have had great results with is a Google Sitemap. in the XML feed you can specify how regularly you update the site and actually give pages a “priority”.

    Now Google says that this won’t affect the SERPS or how frequently the crawl your site, I can’t imagine that they require this information for nothing.

    Your readers can always visit Google for more information on Google Sitemap.

    Best regards,
    David L.

    Comment by Domain Name Registration October 2, 2008 @ 6:04 pm

  2. Hi David, setting the ‘priority’ in the Google sitemap won’t effect how your site gets cached or indexed, otherwise everyone would put all of their pages as ‘daily’.

    Incidentally, unless you’ve changed your name via deed poll to ‘domain name registration’, can you use your real name on the post as using anchor text on a link that is nofollowed doesn’t do your site any favours, and make you look like a spammer?

    Comment by Darren Jamieson October 7, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

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