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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:
- Revised content will encourage GoogleBot to recrawl his pages more often.
- Revised content makes the pages look newer, which may help improve rankings.
- 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.
