What happens when I don't add new content anymore?

I was wondering, if I make a website about a personality that died, what would happen when I exhaust the information and have no new content to add. Let's take Abraham Lincoln for example, I make a page with his bio, one with his works, other pages with detailed commentaries about his works, etc. Eventually I will finish everything there is to be said about him...let's say 100 pages.

Of course, at first Google will be happy to find this new, original content and index it. The second time, he won't find anything new...no big deal, he'll come back another time and maybe he'll get lucky. But what if everytime he crawls my website, he doesn't find anything new. Will he start deindex pages, throw them to the supplemental bin, or what?

 

Someone can probably come up with a more scientific answer - but my thoughts would be along these lines:

1. Lack of fresh content will determine how often your site is crawled - I had a site recently that I forgot for two years and when I looked at the last cache date it was approximately 18 months

2. There's speculation but not confirmation that there is a small freshness boost given by google (but only in certain circumstances)

This articles provides some support:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/remarkable-openness-from-googles-black-box-thanks-to-saul-hansel

The gist is that google may give a freshness boost when they can determine from the search query that the user is looking for "fresh content". So in your example of a historical figure where new information is unlikely to be added across the board - it might not apply. But for the latest shenanigans of Paris Hilton it might.

Like most things to do with SEO its all speculation - but interesting nonetheless.

Dylan

 

If your site achieves good rankings, it should stay there until someone works hard at link building to knock you off....remember, there is nothing new to say about him so every competing site is having the same problem that you are...

 

Imo indeed it'll get crawled less.. but how good it does for serps will depend on the backlinks. If they also die off then it'll loose rank quickly. If the site is old and content does not change, but people still link to it, I don't see why it shouldn't do as good as a site that is updated regulary.

 

This is a good question. Google's recent patent talked about the fresh content issue and how they will help with rankings. If you stop adding new contents, which G will easily know by comparing cached pages, then I guess G can take away the extra points (probably not much to begin with). What else can they do?

I think Google's algorithm should be sophisticated enough to know that if visitors from organic sources still spend significant amount of time on your site, it means the content are still "new" to most of them. In this case, ranking shouldn't be dropped simply because no fresh contents have been added recently.

Google is probably too busy figuring out paid links nowadays; who knows when they will get a chance to implement their ideas.

 

Totally agree with this.

 

Thank you for your answers guys, and sorry for not being able to reply faster...I was out of town. Hopefully the worst thing that can happen is not to be crawled that often. I'm gonna keep you posted, because I intend to do a website about a personality. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and experience!

 

No Google will not deindex them
I never update my website contents, still get good traffics.

 

Google was designed to index academic content and wasn't designed as a commercial application. So a good academic resource in principal shouldn't have to be fresh.

The whole idea changes when you start to talk about indexing news, web 2.0 and commercial sites and add commercial ads to academic infomation(adsense). Now you have an economic incentive for spam.

In addition, I believe that Google is giving a few top "seed" sites a kind of "immunity". So some older sites hang on for whatever amount of time until they are re-ranked.

The reason for this is the google "yo-yo"

Google is obsessed with spam and constantly making changes in their algorithm. Usually the changes just affect a small amount of sites, but, there is collateral damage that knock out legitimate sites. This is what is called the google "yo-yo". Some of the legtimate sites come back as the algorithm is adjusted or tweaked. But some never comeback and stay knocked out.

In order to make the results seem stable. Google doesn't apply the algorithm to the seed sites. Otherwise, Google would be a joke.