Effect of Frequent Changes To Pages On Position

[handfordr]

Recent personal experience seems to indicate that updating a pages content has dramatic positive impact a couple days later on search position. By changing content I mean just adding a paragraph here, editing a sentence there around the same keywords.

Its a well worn statement that regularly updating content is beneficial but my recent experiences indicate the effect is dramatic.

Anyone else can comment on the impact of updates.

One assumes that many people are doing automated updates, just adding the same paragraph at the botton of each page, then removing it a week or so later.
Does it work?

[sublime1]

We have observed that adding fresh content, regularly is good for our SERPs -- sometimes the effect can be seen within a day or two (of when the page is spidered).

[eZeB]

I am seeing changes to text and ranking show up in 24 hours on several sites - old and new.

I am a little nervous about what exactly the rolling updates are doing -- are some of the changes being saved up for the monthly update around the 20th?

last week I changed 2 instances of -- "children's widgets" to "childrens widgets" and dropped from #30 to #130 - I can't believe it is that sensitive so something else must be going on.

Tweaking the algo, introducing new rules slowly, adjusting, testing for the next monthly update?

[ChrisCBA]

I've had mixed “immediate” results with updating my pages. Sometimes they go up (rarely), but generally they fall, sometimes hard.

Today in fact, I woke to having a bunch of terms fall from the top spot to page 6, and some not even listed at all. This all from adding a couple of words & a new link to an internal page 2 weeks ago. (Oddly enough the changes helped initially and showed in the cache fine for those 2 weeks)

I figure it will climb back. It almost does, and usually achieves a higher spot then it was previously, but it gets a little worrisome to see you're self go from #1 to #53 or nowhere at all for every little change you do.

As to when they move up, some times the pages climb back up quickly, and once it took 3 months. But as I said, it almost always achieves a higher position then it once was before the changes.

[BigDave]

While I have seen a fresh boost at times and a fresh drop at other times, I am totally uninterested in it as an SEO option.

I would much rather spend that time working on things that affect the rankings long term.

[geekay]

Last December I uploaded a small new page to my site. It was quickly indexed by Google etc. Unfortunately an html error slipped through. At some stage my wysiwyg editor either added something or omitted to completely delete some changed markup. As no bold exists for this font it looked fine on screen, and I didn't hand check the code (simplified):

<h1><B>Blue</B> widgets</h1>

Now, if you search in Yahoo or MSN Beta for "Blue widgets" my page comes up fine, from the beginning. But Google only knows either "blue" or "widgets"! I soon found out and removed the B's, and also every now and then made minor changes to the text. Googlebot visits this page almost every day, but the Google cache is not updated (for two weeks)!

My h1 keyword missing in Google for two weeks is not a disaster, but confuses me. Does anyone have an explanation? Maybe the text changes have been too small, but Google uses to quickly reflect minor changes in my other pages.