Hey,
I have noticed, over the years, that sometimes search results will display results for pages where the content changes on pageload - for example if an online catalogue displays 5 random products in the "Featured Products" section. Some of the search results may be for these areas of the page.
An idea I just came up with is that each tag could have an additional attribute called "changeFreq" (or something like that) which could be set to PageLoad, Daily, Daily:hh:mm (for example www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/ which changes at about 13:00 - 13:30), Weekly, Weekly:Mon|Tue etc etc - you should get the general idea from these. Search engines, when they scour a page, will pick up the last changeFreq attribute and decide what to do with it. For example consider the following code:
<div changeFreq="Daily:13:00">
<div changeFreq="PageLoad">
Content here will not be displayed in search results.
</div>
Content here will be displayed until 13:00 the next day (the time of the next scan).
<div>
Here, because the changeFreq is not specified for this div, the bot will look at the parent div and therefore display content until 13:00 the next day.
</div>
</div>
I have not quite worked out how this will work - maybe search engines will work out an average for the page and re-index it every x mins / y hours / z days... or maybe, apart from PageLoad, they will take the minimum changeFreq value.
So what do people think of this idea? Good? Bad? I'd like opinions before I even think about contacting W3C or whoever sets the guidelines for HTML. I personally think it would work but I have no idea what the general opinion is or if there are any major disadvantages to the idea or who else I could go to about it.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Richard
PS I know there is a way to advise bots to scan a page every day or week or whatever - but nothing to say that search engines should display only certain parts of the page in search results until a certain day / time.