Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, our site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am thinking of putting an article on my home page in the middle under where it says lifestyle news, and getting rid of the middle column and instead have the latest news there to try and get google to visit more.

I would like to know if you think this would look messy and not user friendly and if you think if i did do it would it get google to visit the site more often.

all day we are always adding articles but on the home page it only shows a few lines of the article so i am concerned that these few lines are not getting google interested in visiting our site more often.

we were on page one with our site but now since the upgrade we are on page eight so we are trying to combat this

The article would change each time we put a new article on the site. so the article could be on there for ten mins before a new one is there

any thoughts on this would be great

[Chris.Menke]

Making that change isn't going to get the page indexed more often and crawl frequency probably isn't your primary problem. If you've been penalized, you're really going to need to sort out what the cause of penalty was if you're to recover from it effectively.  You might try reading through this post for a starting place on penalty ID:

http://moz.com/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi thanks for this. I have contacted google to find out if we have been penalized and they said no but i will read the info, many thanks

[Chris.Menke]

You hadn't mentioned the "upgrade" and if the site was recently re-designed, that could be a contributor to your issue and It may not be a penalty at all.  On the penalty issue however, Google may tell you that no manual penalty has been assessed but that doesn't rule out an algorithmic penalty to your site--algorithmic penalties are not something that will verify.

[ClaireH-184886]

That was a very interesting article, i am just checking to make sure that my links are natural.

we get people linking to our sites because they like an article or the site but we have read about bad links which is used by people who want to drop your site rankings, i am not sure how to find these though.

What would be the best way to get google to visit your site more. would i be wasting my time by having an article on my home page which would change all the time to show fresh content on my home page, or is it enough that i am always adding new content to the site.

[Chris.Menke]

Content provides relevance; links and offsite references provide ranking ability and support relevance.  It's those offsite factors to do the most influencing of your crawl rate. My suggestion is to focus less on the actual crawl rate and instead focus on learning who your audience members are, what their needs are and on using your writing skills to create content that they'll want to share. When you're doing that, your crawl rate will go up.  Oh yeah, links will help with that too.

[ClaireH-184886]

cheers chris, i will focus on that.