Should you change your footer text frequently in order to keep pages fresh?  With the focus many SEOs have on keeping a site from becoming stale, there are many tricks SEOs use in order to make a site look fresh when it really isn’t, and changing up the footer text and/or link is one way to do it.  But does it really help SEO?  Or is it a semi-successful tactic for forcing a higher crawl rate?

The question came up in the Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller today.

I’d say keep it correct, the footers and the headings and stuff that you have on your site, but there’s no need to artificially update your template just to make it look like pages on your site have changed.

We do use the change, or perceived change frequency to help us figure out when we need to crawl but crawling doesn’t mean ranking.  Just because we crawl a lot of content from your site doesn’t mean we’ll show it higher in the rankings.

So that’s something where artificially changing your template and making all of your pages change regularly, you are essentially just putting a load on your server and not getting anything back for that.

So while it might not directly affect rankings, it could be something to force Google to crawl a site more frequently because of the perceived change, something many SEOs like.

But then it could also have an opposite effect.  If Google is noticing changes on all the pages, it doesn’t mean it will crawl all the pages because of it.  Googlebot could decide to only crawl what it deems the most important pages, especially if it notices these pages are changing frequently and then actually crawl the less popular pages with a lesser frequency than it might have done otherwise.   So while some pages could be crawled with greater frequency, it could be at the expense of other pages.

So while this tactic of implied freshness by changing footers could benefit some site owners, it won’t benefit others.  And with no hidden ranking boost related to higher crawl frequency, site owners will need to evaluate whether the higher crawl frequency is helping or hindering by updating footers when there is no real need to do so.