Relationship of Site Updating to Ranking

Is there a relationship?

[jen24815]

Hi,

Just redesigned my site from the ground up. I went from #6 to page 6 in the last update, so I figured I didn't have anything to lose. :)

I noticed today that I'm getting more referrals from Google and Yahoo already.

My question is, my site had very little content before (basically it's a straight commercial site), but I've added quite a bit of content - I would be inclined to think that caused the increased traffic, BUT:

For several months, prior to this, I'd made virtually NO changes to my site other than adding new examples of my work (trying not to be too specific).

Could this have been the reason that I fell so far last update? I mean, could the fact that I had virtually no changes for several months caused me to lose ranking?

The site does have a keyword hyphenated domain name (that's the one I promote for anything other than word-of-mouth), but the other sites that are in the top 10 for the main phrase I'm targeting also have keyword hyphenated domains and many have been there for a few months, so I don't think I got dinged for that.

So, does updating on a regular basis keep your ranking high and if so, how much change is enough - generally speaking?

Thanks!

Jenny

[chiyo]

Hi Jen, just a modest observation from my small part of the world. I believe that there is an advantage for sites that update frequently, and this had become more pronounced for the last two months. Our evidence in quite circumstancial and of course we havent controlled for other factors, but the sites that we updated a lot in the previous month always seem to get a higher increase in Google referrals than those sites we changed less.

I **think*** that new links rather than just updating content tips off google better, and the more regular updating the better (every 1 to 3 days is better than once a week for example).

Freshness always helps too. New news items added to our index pages seem to get on google straight away for a few days. Checking our logs daily, I can predict quite well whether google hits will go down or up depending on whether we have added any new pages in the last 2 days to each site.

Interested to know the experience of others. Was just about to start my own thread on this as the topic has been touched on as a perpheral side topic in many other threads but not given much dedicated attention yet

[edited by: chiyo at 5:02 am (utc) on Oct. 24, 2002]

[2_much]

I wonder what the effect would be of updating all of your outbound links every month, so your entire linkage structure is constantly changing so Google can't map a network?

[jdMorgan]

Jenny,

You didn't say whether your PR was down, or just your listing position and traffic, so the following may not address your concerns directly...

I have not personally seen any PR change or listing position change based soley on the fact that my content was updated. But if you do update your site - or a few pages - fairly often, you will get "freshed" - added to Google's list of pages to crawl frequently.

The opportunity to use this frequent updating to "test" improvements to your page content should not be discounted. It allows some separation of the effects of PR (updated monthly) and more-frequent changes to on-page content.

So, does updating on a regular basis keep your ranking high and if so, how much change is enough - generally speaking?

Enough to keep ahead of the improvements your competition is making to their pages? :) I've stayed on the "fresh" list by making as little as a one-paragraph addition (or deletion) from a News section on one of my home pages every two or three days.

Jim

[jen24815]

Thanks for the info guys!

Jim, my PR remained the same (PR6); I just dropped from #6 to #53.

The problem is, I don't have a control to compare it to; I changed everything from the ground up and eliminated naming one of my directories as /keyword1-keyword2-images/, which might've been penalized.

I'm going to watch it this update and next and see what it does; very good point about the freshing, though.

Chiyo, you have an excellent point about the links; I saw a post when I was doing some searches where someone was discussing the possibility of your ranking being influenced by the number of (or percentage increase of) new links to your site each month. That makes a lot of sense to me and would explain why new sites with decent links rank great the first month and sometimes drop off after that.

At any rate, I suspect we'll see pretty soon, how things are going to shake out this month. Fingers crossed!

Thanks again for all the info, guys. :)

Jenny

[fathom]

Another thought:

Google adds new pages and new sites each and every update. From 1 update to the next there is no guarantees that Google will crawl any sites or even 1 site along your topics and/or keyphrases.

As well, it is also quite feasible that Google will crawl a huge number of new pages and sites within your theme (or someone's theme) simply because (in many cases) sites will links to others sites, that are linked to other sites, that are linked to even more sites which are directly related to your themes.

You really can't get away from others new site/pages forever, but it is quite plausible to get away with no new competition for an update or two.

In addition, many sites owners (after an update occurs) will claim that they have dropped is Google SERP's and a algo tweak has occurred, when it could possibly be just a very large chunk of same theme pages being adding and your pages are no longer as competitive as you thought they were.

Upping the ante/far superior competitors happens alot.

Over a half dozen updates I have notice some keyphrases that use to have a 100,000+ competitive pages, are now a million+ competitive pages.

It is quite reasonable to assume that 50 to 100 pages are as, or more competitive than your (in this case).

SEO is an ongoing struggle and will be so, at least until Google is content with its "trillion" or so archived pages, if then.