Fresh Content And Site Ranking

[Chief]

They say content is king. This is true if you want to attract and keep visitors.

Is content king to improve you website ranking? I doubt it. Not by itself.

Judging from my personal experience, I don't think that providing regular fresh content at your site, will improve its ranking on any search engine.

The only tangible effect you'll accomplish adding regular fresh content is to entice a search engine spider bot like Google to come back to your site more often, like a human being would do. :rolleyes:

What is your opinion?

[Stirls]

In my opinion you must have good content on your site and update it often not for search engine results (although are good) but to keep your customers/viewers coming back to your site.

Regular offline stores don't care where they are in the Yellowpages - they care about if they get customers. If they give good service to a customer and that customer tells their friends then the store will get more customers and so on regardless if their YellowPages ad is on the top or bottom of the page.

Content on your site is your customer service - crappy content and you are giving crappy customer service. Give great content and people will pass your link around like it is the best thing since sliced bread. Before you know it you will have a ton of traffic regardless of where the search engines rank you. But here is the cool thing - often once people start passing your link around you will get better search engine rankings and thus even more traffic. Then it become a machine that you can not stop.

All this happens with good, no GREAT content.

[AvParties4u]

Great Post Stirls
I agree..

[sharondavis]

Well said, Chris. I agree 100%.

As we all know, Google doesn't give out any secrets on how their algorithms work. The advice they give is:

"Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."

And...

"Make pages for users, not for search engines."

That really says it all. I know that content is very, very important to my site visitors and so that is where I focus my efforts. I'm constantly thinking about what features and information would be most useful and interesting to them.

[Chief]

We all know that fresh and well written content is a must to attract and keep both visitors coming to your site and search engines; there is no doubt about that, but that's not the point.

The subject to discuss here is: If providing regular fresh content will improve the ranking of a web site.

My opinion about that is that I don't think that providing regular fresh content (by itself) will do any good to the ranking of the site.

[sharondavis]

Hi Javier,

I hear what you're saying, I just think that the point that Chris was trying to make is that it is more important to focus on content rather than worrying about ranking. I do believe that if you build a relevant, focused site with continually fresh content the rest will follow.

So my bottom line is that yes, I do believe that providing fresh content can eventually affect your ranking-- perhaps not in and of itself, but as a by-product of having a useful and relevant site.

[Chief]

So my bottom line is that yes, I do believe that providing fresh content can eventually affect your ranking-- perhaps not in and of itself, but as a by-product of having a useful and relevant site.
Hi Sharon, I agree with your statement specially with the bold line.

[erikko]

let me put it this way, content is always the heart of the site, building links and promotion is just the site's lifeline

[peterlee]

Having fresh content on your homepage is important but helps fulfill a very small part of the equation to rank high in SE. The most important of all is old backlinks. Here is an interesting view by a seo specialist who did extensive seo testing:

40% because of old BLs
25% because of new BLs
15% because of updates
10% because it offers a useful service or resource
10% others

I am also using the same SEO Link Building Strategy. In fact I am starting a series of posts sharing this SEO Strategy. I you are keen to find out more, just check up on my blog.

The first is just out.
Link Building-Deep Links (Part 1) (http://www.peterleehc.com/blog/work-from-home/home-business-ideas-link-building-strategy-deep-links-part-1)

Peter Lee

[sharondavis]

Hi Peter,

Great blog post. I'll be looking forward to the rest of your series.

[MH Vishal]

Website with content that changes frequently often see increased spider activity as Google articles tries to make sure all the latest stories are indexed quickly. But it ranks to the fresh content by keeping following thing in mind.

1) New content is given a boost but usually only if it is determined to be topical
2) Just adding fresh content for the sake of a site and especially if the content is not original and useful than it won't work, you should be adding high quality articles containing topical content to benefit your readers.
3) One of the main reasons websites with often changing content see a boost in rankings is nothing to do with the fact Google likes fresh content- the reason is purely down to links.

Well, In short never use a content from an articles directory just to gain a fresh content boost and the act of publishing fresh content doesn't automatically give you a ranking boost.