I have been using rotating spun content for a number of reasons and wanted to know whether the rotating of content is a ranking factor or not in the SERPs. Small changes like the date and location, will they affect ranking?
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Is rotating content a ranking factor? That's from Jo Priest. Actually, this is pretty interesting. What he did is a thousand words and then the last 200 words actually rotates. So, every time the Googlebot gets to the page it gets a different set of 200 words at the bottom which is cool if you think about it.
If you did that to users I think that would be pretty neat to just play around with their minds. You get a really proper post and you just change it every time they read it and it says something different. That might be interesting for my user engagement perspective. Unfortunately, for Google, they didn't necessarily care. You can change it all you want. We're not going to reward you and we're not going to hurt you either.
The indexing actually stuck pretty well. He was running this test during the time when everyone was having a lot of issues with indexing so you can see that the rotating text actually didn't hurt indexing at all. I think he's only got one set here. There's three test pages that didn't index out of all these pages and that remain consistent during the times of his things.
So, I think it's clear that they didn't care about the rotating content. You can read a lot more of his insights in here and some other ways that he's thinking about changing this a little bit and see if he's playing with some different factors like keyword density, the freshness, position of the content. He rotated in this test to last 200 words what if he rotates the first 200 words. What if he rotates the stuff in the middle is Google going to be a little bit different and reward him or punish him based off of that information?
I think this test has a ton of implications. I would like to run some versions of this as well just in a single variable environment before I knock out and do like he did with the ten sites just to see if we get consistent changes in a single variable that we can actually apply to this ten sites thing and get something that's really useful from it.
I don't know of a practical reason as to why you'd want to do this other than just maybe some entertainment stuff. Maybe Dori or you can think of something or Jo, I know he listens to the recordings and we'll see if he's got some different insights into the practical reason of what you might do with that.
DORI: Back in the day, when we were cloaking and doing a lot of on-page mass site productions we would rotate our text like almost once a week and it seemed to give us a bump, just like a respin of the same stuff. So, that was one practical reason.
Another thing, I think too, if you were rotating keywords you might get a bump for some of those and especially if you were rotating links. We have a link spinner that's in our software now that will actually rotate your links and so you can get more bang for your buck.
CLINT: That's interesting. I know now it's different because you have to get Googlebot to go back. How did you control it and then how did you monitor to make sure they're actually doing it?
DORI: I would just look at my Ahrefs, my aw stats. I would go in there and make sure that Googlebot had come to the page. We don't have anything set up like that in our software yet. It's like, Yes, we should rotate it after we know that Google's spidered it. You can set the rotation on a weekly, monthly thing. It hasn't been out at all actually so we haven't had a lot of use with the tool yet.
CLINT: Yes, it makes sense. ~ just be harder to say, I think just now, just knowing the way that Googlebot is responding and how just convoluted Search Console is, is picking that time so that you know when you can anticipate because otherwise you have to do this daily.
You gotta sit there and look at your server logs and say, "alright, Googlebot came today and now I can rotate it" versus figuring out a pattern so that Dori knows, "ok, once a week I can rotate." or "okay, this set of sites is getting Google BOTS coming to it every day versus this set of sites is getting it once a week versus this one is coming once a month."
So, I think that would probably be the practical application of this test and the follow along is how you monitor your crawl rate so that you can accurately predict when the Googlebot is going to come back.
DORI: Yes, that would be this case.