Does Content Go Stale?

[noah_body]

Just wondering if the age of content on a site factors into SEO. If a site doesn't change its content, does it keeps its placement, or will it slip? If content changes do help, would rotating content (for example randomly displaying one of 4 blocks of text) be enough, or should there be a newly uploaded page.

Any experience or thoughts on the matter?

[aleatrix]

I'm no expert on this, but we've had more or less the same text content on our menu pages for two or three years. I may have added or changed the copy a little here or there, but nothing drastic--certainly we didn't submit a whole new page, and our search engine rankings have remained the same on Google and Yahoo.

I should qualify the above by saying that while our menu pages are static, our product pages change as merchandise is sold and new items are put up. Whether or not that affects our search engine placement, I don't know.