Does Google still crawl pages with dynamically changing content like news feeds?

Question

Some websites like the following have a news feed on their homepage that provides the majority of content, which is an increasingly popular feature:

• https://www.producthunt.com/
• https://www.tripoto.com/
• https://dribbble.com/

If a website had a static homepage, the page would be indexed and the links on the homepage would drive steady SEO traffic.

When a website has a dynamic news feed however, especially if that news feed is personalized, the links on the homepage are constantly changing.

Would this cause Google to stop crawling the page and instead cache it since the page is constantly changing by the minute?

Answer 1

If the entire purpose of the page is to display content from other sites (such as a news feed) then you will find that you won't rank highly anyway as you need to have original content of your own. Putting that aside for one minute it mainly depends on how the content is being displayed and how Google interprets it. If it is interpreted as a news feed then Google will ignore it as not being your own pages content, if on the other hand Google interprets it as your pages content and that every time Google crawls your page the content is different Google may increase crawl rates for a period. The big caveat to this though is that simply consuming a news feed (or something similar) on your page to display content is not a good web strategy as you will find your site reduced further and further in rank.

I will use an Australian state government website as an example. It is a mix of static original content as well as dynamically changing content (via AJAX) being displayed all the time (it is a site that shows active fires and rescues across the state of Victoria). This site ranks very highly in Google as an authoratative source of information, including having the individual incidents indexed by Google when they are added to the site, as they are displaying original content, it may all be fed in from other locations and change minute by minute but the site is still displaying original content as the data does not show individually anywhere else. Further more the site has static pages which are of a high value, original, and high quality. All of this contributes to a very highly ranking website.