The Importance of Fresh Content

Fresh Content

Google loves fresh content.

An associate of mine decided to work on website for his friend who is a mechanic. My friend/associate a database guy, and can't do much in the way of design or writing. He always says "I can make it work but can't make it look nice", and I fully agree

He spent hours, possibly days, designing a logo and link bar for the home page. Almost a week later he uploaded the site (nothing but the index page) then just stopped working on it. The Googlebot made its appearance, indexed the single page site, then moved on.

He didn't touch the site for almost a year, and the site owner was little upset. He asked me to "just put something out there…anything is better than a home page with a bunch of dead links". I helped him out and quickly put together some light content and a site layout.

I've been watching the site for the past two months and the Googlebot has not been back. Google's cache shows a home page for the site that hasn't been up for months. The Googlebot visits other sites that I maintain that have new content added often on a much more frequent basis.

Point being - content, fresh content, is king. Google seems to avoid stale content. Give the Googlebot something new to read on each visit and my experience has shown that it will be back often.

If you're a "little guy", just getting ready to launch a new site, I have two suggestions;

1. Spend some time building the site before you start publishing it. So many people rush to put their "home page" out there hoping to get indexed quickly. This is a big mistake in my opinion. Make sure you have at least 10 - 20 pages of unique content before you launch your site. You will be much better off if you can have more content right at launch.

2. If you want the site to actually draw traffic, plan to add new content as often as possible. I try and add a minimum of 5 new pages a week to my primary sites. Obviously the more pages the better, but I'm not a full time SEO or web designer and have to be realistic. Set a schedule to add content that's do-able for you and stick to it.

If you follow these suggestions at the end of year one you'll have a site with 250 - 300 pages of original content. While surely not the largest on the web, if you target your keywords well in your copy a site of this size should help you start drawing some relevant traffic from the search engines. Keep this up and after 3 years you will have a site with close to 1,000 pages that should be drawing a fair amount of relevant search engine traffic.

Did I mention Google likes fresh content?

 

Good Question Shawn,

I have one or two old pages that G visits but goes no further. I will alter this & post back in a while.

OWG

 

How much of a change is required to constitute a change? If I just re-phrase one or two paragraphs on a single page, is this likely to be picked up as a change?

Also if i just have a small number of pages, and much of my content is dynamic, will this reduce the likelihood of being re-indexed? I ask this because the site I am working on will be an online shop, using PHP and MySQL to show catalogue items. Surely DB changes will not have an effect on the 'change' criteria (i.e. my HTML and PHP classes will remain the same despite updating the DB!!).

Simon

 

Not sure what I can do about this, as I am using a shared server, so there is a limit to what I am permitted to do.

I am guessing (as my site is not officially launched yet) that using PHP may not be detected as changing content, as I will be designing an object-oriented solution that encapsulates most of the functionality within the classes (and not embedded in html). This option is for security and to try and avoid spammers extracting email addresses, etc.

Has anyone tried this and does it prevent a good hit rate being acheived (as far as google indexing is concerned)??

Simon

 

Good, so that's sorted.

On another note, as there was a mention of fast and slow spidering earlier, what disadvatages would this have, or would this only apply if I had an incredibly high hit rate? Is this a concurrecy issue or something with varying spidering rates? Would it still only be a fraction of a second, or are we talking noticeably longer?

Simon

 

How much of a change is required to constitute a change? If I just re-phrase one or two paragraphs on a single page, is this likely to be picked up as a change?

Has anyone yet found anything on that point? That is, how much change is "change"? It is an obviously fascinating question.

For that matter, if a page has Text A, then changes a week later to Text B (which we will assume is quite different from A), that is a change for sure; but if yet a week later the page reverts to Text A, is that also a "change"? (Obviously, this drives toward whether periodic flip-flops would be of any use.)

 

I have a cronjob that adds a whitespace to a random amount of my pages at a random time of day that helps with getting google to index my site alot more, from what i can tell, so I believe it checked the timestamp put on documents, like when you edit on your computer.

 

Perfer to play it safe and literally add something as well.

 

A search for "The Importance of Fresh Content" in Google - this thread ranks #2.

That was quick

Not that that's a competitive term, but I'm still amazed at how fast/dead on Google can be sometimes.

 

To be honest, although I hear a lot about "fresh content" I have yet to see anyone really prove the case that fresh content really works.

I went through a phase a while back trying to constantly change certain key pages - but I never saw any real effect.

The original post doesn't give a good example, because if Google hasn't been in for months then what you have is a site with no real links - so there's no way to make any conclusion based on fresh content, IMO.

 

We do too

We see new content go into the top positions [or not if I've screwed it up as the case may be] very quickly and when our major sites were left unattended for 9 months due to unforeseen reasons stopping us servicing our sites we drifted away down the pecking order.

We had just started to reverse the trend after one month of work in April of 2003 when the May sort out stopped us temporarily. More work more new content and just refreshing the sites and then we climbed back [Florida did not touch us] until January when we were hammered - more refreshing etc and we are back across the board again.

 

I should point out that the best fresh content, at least in my experience, is NEW content. Not simply updating an existing page or changing a couple words on a page, but adding brand new pages with new, original content.

Not saying that page modification doesn't have value, just saying that you really can't go wrong by adding new pages & content.

I do still see some very stale pages rank in high in Google results on certain key words Most of the time if you look at the pages they are beating out you realize that the stale site has 1) lots of inbound links, and 2) lots of inbound links.

It's almost inevitable though - stale sites will fall by the wayside when another webmaster actively pursues the keywords the stale site is holding on to.

 

If you're looking for an example - I think this forum is a good one.

"The Importance of Fresh Content" is # 2 in the Google SERPS.

How long until it takes #1?? - I doubt it will be long. While I don't think it will move to #1 based on "fresh content" alone, I surely don't think the dozens of posts (ie fresh content) each day in this forum are hurting it either.

Opinions?