Blogs drop in SERPS if you don't post for X days?

It seems that when I don't post for a few days, my serps start to steadily fall, and eventually go way, way down. Is this true or is it something else I'm doing wrong?

How often do I need to post to avoid this? Would it be better to set up static sites to avoid this?

 

Google love fresh contents. They crawl blogs frequently as result, it becomes visible more in search engine rankings in short spam of time. So, i would suggest you to update the blog content every week.

 

I dont think it matters, I see blogs that are made for the purpose of making one post and making money off of adsense that have a high SERP.

 

So why do most spiders LOVE blogs if blogs only have a few posts and then are left?

 

Well I guess they heavily backlink the site. I have seen blogspots with 1 bs post about loans or whatever rank high.

 

It is quite obvious that you need to update your content more frequently.

 

I have few blog where I have not updated for years. I receive same traffic from Google and same SERP. So I dont think there is any requirement to update the site.

 

Exactly.

They basically treat blogs the same as website, only difference is that they use the blogs RSS Feed sometimes for displaying new posts.

Ultimately blogs seem to be more of an advantage because they can be found so many different ways.

 

You drop down in your serp position mainly due to the competition snatching away your position.

If the keyword is very less competitive, I doubt it would make much difference to your serps in the absence of your update.

Regards,

RightMan

 

If you post regularly you get spidered regularly. I've noticed drops in traffic & rank from neglecting various blogs sites of mine in recent months/years and whilst it's not the site/blog itself that is the issue, as RightMan says, the competition will be working on producing fresh new content while you're not. By not updating you're letting competitors get ahead.

 

Combining fresh content and building backlinks is the key to getting higher rankings. Your traffic will build over time from these two efforts.

 

Providing fresh content really has nothing to do with how your existing posts rank. Providing fresh content does two things:

1) It can cause Google to increase your crawl frequency, and
2) It gives you the opportunity to rank for new keywords

It does not affect how your 'old' pages or posts rank. This is the same whether you have a blog, a wiki, a forum, or a traditional web site.

Increasing Your Crawl Frequency
When you first create a new site (be it a blog, a forum, a wiki, a traditional site, whatever) you get a couple of inbound links or submit a sitemap.xml to Google's webmaster tools, and BAM! You get indexed... But Google and the other engines are not going to crawl your site frequently. They'll likely visit your site once per month at first to see if anything has changed since the last time they visited.

If they look at your site and notice that everything is the same as the last time they visited, they're like, "Pfft... I will pop back in again in a month to see if they've added anything new." So a month later they come back and everything is the same so again they say, "Pfft... Lazy blogger. I will pop back in again in a month to see if they've added anything new."

Now if the next time they visit they suddenly notice that you've added 25 new posts in the last month, they are probably going to index a few of those new posts and say to themselves, "Hmmm these guys are starting to generate some content... Perhaps I should check back sooner next time." So they change your crawl schedule to maybe try back in a couple weeks instead of a month to see if you are continuing to generate new content.

If they come back in two weeks and find 50 posts, they'll index some more of them and be like, "Wow... These guys are generating content faster than I can keep up with... so maybe I should crawl them every 3-4 days!" They change your crawl frequency again to visit you more often...

This goes on and on until they find what they think is the right crawl frequency to keep up with rate of content generation.

Another thing that will increase your crawl frequency is getting links from other sites. If you have 1 inbound link from a site that itself only gets crawled once per month then this is likely not going to help. But if you're like my site with 1.2MM inbound links, Google will be crawling your site practically every minute of every hour of every day of the year.

The reason is that in addition to YOUR scheduled crawls, those sites that link to you are also scheduled to be crawled. When Google is crawling a site that links to you, their spider will follow the links on the other sites because they want to find out if you've placed any 301 redirects in place on your site so that they can adjust credit for inbound links from your old URLs to your new URLs.... or to see if the link is even still good or now throwing a 404 to determine if they might need to eventually drop your page out of their index.

So when they are crawling a site that links to you, Googlebot will follow the link on that other site to your site... Regardless of whether they discover a new 301 redirect on your site they will index the page on your site that is linked to from the other site. Then they are usually like, "Well, while I'm here I may as well poke around a bit and see if I can find anything new!" So they will crawl a few pages (possibly indexing new content they find on your site) and then leave.

It's not an in depth crawl of your site but with lots of links from other sites who are also indexed often, you can get crawled many times through out the day. You can have your site crawled completely several times per day with enough inbounds... This happens a lot with blogs because of 1) blogs posting their own fresh content so they already have a frequent crawl rate and 2) other blogs who also frequently post fresh content also having your blog in their blog roll.

Opportunity to Rank for New Keyword Phrases
With the exception of the home page, changing the content on pages that already rank well is just plain dumb IMO. If it ain't broken then don't fix it! People who think that changing a sentence or two on an existing page is going to make it somehow rank better because "it's fresh" don't have a clue what they are doing or how search engines work.

I'm not saying changing the content of the page can't make it rank better. I'm simply saying that making changes just so Google gets a more recent "last modified" date has absolutely NOTHING to do with your rankings.

Yeah! If you have a page that you are trying to rank for "Car Maintenance" but your dumb author used "vehicle maintenance" in the <h1>, the <h2>s and throughout the article even though the <title> is "Car Maintenance - Car Maintenance Tips" then Yes! Changing a lot of the occurrences of "Vehicle" to "Car" in the <h1>, <h2>s, and content can make a big difference in the way the page ranks.

But the increase in rankings would be because now your <h1>, <h2>s, and content are all targeting the same keyword phrase as the <title> (and hopefully the inbound link texts)... It has nothing to do with the "freshness" of the page. I have pages that rank #1 that haven't been touched in years.

"Frequency of change to content for a URL" as a ranking factor is a total myth.

Now! Adding fresh content DOES give you a great opportunity to rank for NEW keyword phrases. If I have a car site, I'm not going to write 1000 articles about the exact same topic and try to rank all 1000 for the exact same keyword phrase. That would be a total waste of time and energy.

So usually people's blog posts or articles on traditional sites or whatever will be related to a common subject matter but the topics themselves AND the keyword phrases used will naturally be different. So each new page you add provides you with a new opportunity to rank for new keyword phrases and to drive new traffic.

You get a new page about something slightly different, you get another <title>, another <h1>, another set of <h2>s and new content where you can target a new keyword phrase (or phrases if very similar). You can now build links to this new page with new keyword phrases in the link text, etc.

It's simply that the new content gives you the chance to rank for new keywords... Google never says, "Hmmm this guy adds content at a higher rate than that other guy so even his old posts or crappy posts I'll give a boost to because he's a good webmaster providing me fresh stuff to index." That is just a myth. It's the wrong cause/effect.