The "ReDate" SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Toy

Providing Search Engines With "Fresh" Pages


What is a "Fresh" Page (and Why Does it Matter?)

One of the points on which there seems to be general agreement in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community is that search engines--and especially Google®--like to see fresh content--which is to say pages whose content changes frequently.

There are some tools on this site-- Weather, Rates--that can provide you simple modules you can paste into any of your "regular" site pages, and that then automatically provide on those pages frequently changing content of a sort actually at least interesting and possibly useful to your site visitors.

But those, or any other freshening material that you drop into a page by means of SSI (server-side includes, that is, .shtml files with SSI data directives, such as the current date/time, or SSI file-includes) do not update the date/time ("last modified") stamp of that page, because they are not a part of that file when it is considered as data on a hard drive on a server--thus, searchbots cannot know a file has fresh content unless they look into it, and they may not look into it if its date/time stamp is unchanged since their last visit. To chnage the date/time stamp of a file, you need to actually edit the file, or apply a "touch" command to it.

Manually editing, or even "touching", large numbers of files daily is logistically impractical. And that's where ReDate comes in: when run, ReDate simply scans all your sites' directories for .htm, .html, and .shtml files, and "touches" each.

(It also allows you to exclude as many directories as you like, in case you have any where, for whatever reason, you do not want the files' date/time stamps updated automatically.)

This package is completely free.


Features

One installation of Redate can and will handle as many distinct web sites as you may have on the same server it resides on. Redate also allows you to specify particular directories that you do not, for whatever reason, want redated.

Redate takes a few minutes for a one-time install and can thereafter be run as a scheduled "cron" job as often as you like (I recomend daily, overnight).

Redate will redate all pages in directories it is allowed into that have an extension of .htm, .html, or .shtml.


System Requirements:

There are only two: your site's server must be capable of running PHP, which virtually all are; and it must either have PHP's "safe mode" Off or provide cgi wrapping for PHP scripts, one or the other which situations is the case on almost all servers.


(Here is the "Redate" v. 0.10 toy package as a single ZIP file.)


Change History:

0.10: initial release

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