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The search engine spiders will look at a page to determine if something has changed. If there is a 10% change in body content, then it might not require a re-index for the spiders. If the heading tags change, then it might deserve a refresh. I think your link will be indexed eventually, but if nothing else on the page changes, it's going to take longer.

Thanks for the reply! It's definitely tough to kill content (especially when you paid a writer to do an interesting story or event coverage). So using your suggestion, I looked at a minor section, thats new, but has suffered over the past 30 days. 130 articles  73% bounce 73% exit 1m TOS 26k pageviews of those, 35 articles have 100% bounce rate, under 10 pageviews, under 1min TOS. I assume applying a simple metric such as this, site wide, and unpublishing articles that fall under this category, would help clear the brush away from the newer content?

Here is the question you posted: Just because the link is picked up by OSE does that mean that the search engines value it too? The answer is very simple: no. However, there is a relationship between the OSE data and Google data. This relationship is not causation. It's correlation. This doens't mean that if you have a link picked up by OSE it will necessarily be picked up by Google. It means that links that tend to be picked up by OSE also tend to be picked up by Google. I hope this helps!

Sry for my missuse of words: I meant every page/subpage ! So is it better for the ranking to get +1s for one page or to get a few on every page ? Thanks a lot, it has helped so far!

Thank you Theo for your response, I really appreciate your time and answer.

Some. I think that's all anybody knows right now lol. I watched a seminar from Distilled's LinkLove set where it was explained that in an experiment, a bunch of retweets boosted a site with just one link above a competing, similar site with a lot more links. The topic as a whole though seems to be in discussion a lot at the moment, with blogs, etc... talking about it, and of course research being posted here at SEOmoz. I think the general consensus is that it has value, and that value is likely to increase, but I haven't seen anywhere as yet where there's much agreement about just how much value there is in it. I assume we'll be seeing something soon enough though Please do anybody correct me if I'm wrong, it would be great to see if there are any hard & fast stats out there. There is the ranking factors of course... which provide a good guideline: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-4

Thanks, I'll give that a try

Thanks, Steve.  That makes sense.

Hi Dan Thank you - that is the final piece of information I needed to get so I could have an overall feel as to the way I should look at this. in a holistic way. Best wishes PH

Thats why I ask on SEOmoz, a sensible answer with sensible advice that can be easily put into action. This had crossed my mind, however I've been staring at the woods so long, I couldn't see the trees! Thanks EGOL.

Thanks but as I mentioned above I am in Germany so cannott use analytics at all, hence my need to find another way to do this

What I can recall from Matt Cutts is that Google is pretty much ignoring all meta tags besides the 'description' one. Given the fact that I've never even heard of this one, I think it is pretty save to assume it is of no value (atleast to search engines).

Given the current state of the Internet (with the shorteners you've mentioned, etc) I would suggest to use English characters so a maximum amount of people can read the URL.

Thought I'd post a follow up on our 6 months later to see if anyone else has seen a similar pattern in Bing rankings. Peaked at the end of June (compared to previous average rank) Declined by ~15% to end of July Same until end of Aug Declined by ~20% until end of Sept Improvement of ~15% until the end of Oct Decline by ~45% in mid-Nov (pretty much back to same levels) as beginning of June levels - mention on WebmasterWorld about this: http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4389293.htm Same until now There have been changes to the content on the site, so not too surprised at some of the results, but would be good to know if the regularity of changes to the Bing algo has been seen by others...