Can you still maintain your SE rankings even if you don't update your site?

Can you still maintain your SE rankings even if you don't update your site? Just wondering if you can just make a site/blog, add 4-5 quality articles, a sitemap, etc. and then forget about adding new content and just focus on building backlinks?

Or is content really.. king?

 

i'm no expert, but let me say this...

STATIC, strong (REAL) websites don't have to constantly update/add content to RANK WELL.
there are 1000s (millions?) of websites that rank well without constantly (or ever) adding new content...
domain registrars, web hosting companies, small + large corporate websites etc, etc.

IMHO

 

Nop, competition is too high and keeps updating so... i have to do the same

 

content is king but you have to update your content daily.. ^_^ peace.

 

msn and yahoo need to be fed regularly so updating is really a must

 

Website built on static pages .html doesnt need to be updated much, but websites built on dynamic(php,aspx etc) pages need to.
But then now there's much more competition.. so keep updating

 

there's too much competition nowadays simply because Google never updated its algorithm. Take a look at consumerpricewatch.net. In Google.com US, it's sitting on the first position of keyword "diet pills", the most competitive in weight loss industry after "diet" and "weight loss" keywords.

Check its backlinks, he gets all of his backlinks through paid blog posts, and almost all of them are from unrelevant websites. They are clearly paid links, yet he's still trusted by Google to be the winner in this very competitive keyword.

So theoretically everyone has the same opportunity, even a newbie can learn SEO as easy as piece of cake because Google has never really updated its algorithm. The only difference from 2007 and 2008 is now you can't get good rank with paid links from directories. Yet, paid blog posts from UNRELEVANT websites can make you sit on the highest throne. Things will be different if Google constantly improve its algorithm because newbie will need to learn more to keep up with the competition.

But now? Oh man cmon, Google is not that great. Consumerpricewatch.net, discreet-romance.com, etc. are just some examples to show that with paid blog posts from unrelevant websites, you can still become the winner.

 

There will be always shortcuts to get to the top. But if you want to do it the "regular" way, update at least once a day and build build build backlinks...

 

SE traffic slowly decreases if you don't update your site, but it will still be significant for months or even years.

In my experience if I leave a site un-updated for some months SE traffic will drop by 20%.

 

if the site has a lot of good content than it doesn't need to be updated as often

 

i think more backlinks would do that, that's what i think.

 

There's so many people advocating the "update" your site theory. But in my opinion they're regurgitating what they've heard without really knowing for sure.

The only benefit to updating regularly is that Google will begin to increase its crawl frequency because it knows there's always new information to be had. This doesn't help with rankings its justs gets your new pages indexed faster.

It is possible to simply make a few posts and then concentrate on backlinking and maintain a rank.

However you will have 2 problems:

#1 There may be competition, so you will have to beat their linking efforts.

#2 Newer sites competing for the keyword you're ranking for will get a temporary algorithm boost. (to help relevent breaking news get to the top when it matters). You will have to have enough links to still beat this temporary boost.

What updating often will do though...

#1 Increase crawl rate as previously mentioned.
#2 Increase the chance you'll end up writing something that strikes a chord with lots of people and get a bunch good links to your domain.
#3 Keep people who have bookmarked your site or subscribed to your feed coming back for more.

Only the second point will actually help rankings. Updating often in itself does not help improve or maintain a rank.

 

It's complete rubbish that you have to update daily. For a start - loads of well-regarded blogs update weekly - very few blogs written by a single person have enough good material to jusify daily updates- better one good post than 7 bad ones.
And most websites aren't blogs.
If you have all the other seo factors working for you, including strong back-links, you can stay at the top of serps with occasional updating - hell - if your backlinks are strong enough you can stay at the top of serps indefinately without making a single change.

 

Thank you magda.

 

I think Content is the king. SE gives more impotent to contents. So always keep updating contents is better

 

Hi, it is possible to achieve a good ranking and maintain a good ranking in search engines even without updating your website.

However, keep in mind that it will take time to earn a high ranking on a major search engine in most cases with keywords that are "competitive".

I noticed that you mentioned you would focus on backlinks for the site instead of updating the information on the site itself. Backlinks are important to SEO; however, backlinks are just one aspect to SEO. It usually takes a well rounded approach to search engine optimization instead of focusing on one particular aspect to achieve and maintain high search engine rankings.

Once you achieve a high ranking, you can then see that website maintain the ranking without updating or doing very little regarding updates. The reason is that the algorithms for search engines will continue to reward a website that has a high search engine ranking as long as the website remains in good favor with the search engines. The longer a website maintains a high search engine ranking, the more trust it will earn from the search engines, which in the end helps the website maintain that high ranking.

Thanks,
Eric

 

I don't think daily is neccessary but I do think that at least weekly would still be neccessary. Once you have a years wort of content you can post a "What I was writing about last year during this week" post and then link back to the old articles. This gives you one new article a week.

 

Wow, due to the recent posts, I'm really starting to think otherwise. (that there's no need to update)

Thanks for the insight guys.

Maybe I should post this up on some SEO forums aswell to see what they think.

Any other thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated aswell.

 

Count my vote for "Backlinks are king, and content is, oh well, I couldn't be too bothered about that stuff"

But seriously,

Alot of content is good for capturing alot of long tail serps, which will help traffic, and indeed having most of your traffic come from long tail spanning alot of pages is a more robust less risky source of traffic.

But, if your mainly after a more limited set of prize keywords on a limited number of pages then imo there is no neeed to become a content writing robot. Imo the time is better spent gaining the best backlinks you can.

Some sites (such as EzineArticles) even nofollow the internal linking to the majority of the content proabaly so it does not disipate too much juice from the new and proven stuff.

 

btw, love your avitar Skribblez