Suzannah Porter's Library tagged Google →  View Popular

The staleness of a document may be based on:



• document creation date,
• anchor growth, traffic,
• content change,
• forward/back link growth, etc.

Google patent explains how they can spot the stale content using 4 factors:



• Query-based factor;
• Link-based criteria;
• Traffic - based criteria;
• User-behavior-based criteria.

1. Query-based factor basically refers to analyzing which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Besides, the search engine tracks which queries one and the same document ranks for: “discordant set of queries” might mean the page is spammy.

2. Link-based factor analyzes the page backlinks monitoring the dates that new links appear (i.e. “indexed by Google or the date the linking page was created”) to a document and that existing links disappear. By looking into the the rate at which links appear or disappear over time and how many links appear or disappear during a given time period, the search engine is able to conclude whether there is trend toward appearance of new links versus disappearance of existing links to the document or vice versa:



• downward trend = > stale document (more links disappear than appear);
• decrease in links = > stale content (either sudden or significant link disappearance).

• Check how many URLs from your site have been indexed: search [site:yourdomain.com] and “dig deeper” into the search results:



[site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory1] + [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory2] + etc (the “deeper” you digg, the more/ the more accurate results you get)

• Identify most powerful pages of your site:



[ www site:yourdomain.com]

[ tld site:yourdomain.tld]

[inurl:domain site:yourdomain.com]

[domain site:yourdomain.com]




(kudos to SEOmoz for the tip)

• Identify most powerful pages of your site (keyword-dependent): search [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:keyword];
• (based on the previous one) Find sites with most potential (to further promote them):



[site:yourdomain.com inanchor:”key * word”]

[site:yourdomain.com intitle:”key * phrase”]

• Find most relevant pages of your site (to further promote them for the specified term): search [site:yourdomain.com keyword] or [site:yourdomain.com key * phrase]

So here a few ways you can see your pages with the search engine’s eyes:



• View your page in a text-mode web browser - Lynx lets you see the text-only version of the page,
• Disable JavaScript and CSS in your current browser and check that your site works correctly (make sure you can see everything you want Google to see);
• Look at the text-only version of Google’s cache of the page (all the text Google saw when it last crawled the page):