Today’s topic is based on the importance of refreshing your on page content from time to time to toggle “the fresh content factor” to get a boost in the SERPs (search engine result pages) using SEO.
Chronology and relevance reside at the core of search engine optimization and frankly, a website that has remained dormant for weeks or months without an update is not that appealing to search engines. Search engines reward fresh relevant content, or content layered with existing context to reinforce relevance.
On the contrary, once you reach a particular stage of on page and off page relevance for a series of keywords and terms, allowing your site to percolate ranking factors is just fine. Once you exceed the base level ranking criteria for a keyword, you can remain buoyant for extended periods. The point is, you must first cross the tipping point or your website and its rankings will be subject to volatility and receding in the index.
The primary objective is, to get a website into a favorable position if you intend to decrease post frequency. Since relevance is a two way street (based on the synergy or information and people looking for information), one metric search engines use to assess relevance is how frequently you add of modify content.
In fact, there is even an HTTP/1.1 status code to summarize if your content has changed or not, it is known as the 304 HTTP status code. The 304 status of a page translates into – not modified – and in a sea of gigaflops of information being skimmed, crawled and indexed on virtually every topic and website online, the website / page freshness factor counts when it comes to how your page is evaluated in the index.
Aside from relevance, and the volume of competition on each subject in search engines, you must first mirror that relevance within your website, then receive validation from other websites in order to exceed others targeting the same keywords and rankings.
I have seen this aspect of optimization countless times. If you neglect a website before reaching a particular relevance plateau, a website can flounder and remain dormant and essentially fizzle out in contention to SEO.
One tactic we utilize to overcome such stagnation is to go back and edit similar pages in the site that share a topic or have an overlapping frequency of terms which can be used to strengthen the internal linking of a website.
For example, if you wanted to increase your search engine positioning for Keyword A, then you (1) find all pages in your website that have context for singular and plural versions of Keyword A (2) edit those pages to link out to your NEW page (based on Keyword A) and then when those old pages get crawled and indexed you already have relevant links to reinforce and communicate topical relevance for Keyword A.
Link reputation also known as the link graph (a metric that looks at the links in and links out to each page in your website) is responsible for sculpting the way a page communicates intent and how it is valued in context for the keywords appearing in the links. 50% of the ranking factor is under your control with on page optimization and layering through methods described above (uniting co-occurrence for a favorable concentration of context).
These two attributes on page continuity and off page link reputation are some of the primary metrics search engines use to determine where to put your page in the index (relevance score) as well as the degree of trust and authority your website can gain regarding the topical context of the subject matter.
The idea is, to concentrate your content as much as possible through revisions, deep links and creating fresh content based on keyword research to preserve the rankings you have, while simultaneously scaling the heights of new / relevant keywords that can benefit your website and ultimately your business model.
I can personally confirm your claim here Jeffry.
4 months back my blog use to be PR4 but my more then 2 month absence from blogging activity have robed me off it. now my blog is pr3
thanks for this article, i agree that updating your contnent frequently affect too much SEO and improve your ranking, i have experience on this.
Is there some “proved frequency” for successful new posting or site updating?
Regarding proven post frequency meaning “does it work”?, absolutely…
Since most of SEO is heuristic, opinions vary, however 3-5 posts per week is a minimum for competitive verticals.
It all depends on the amount of authority your website has. Increasing post frequency with quality content is one way to expedite authority. Rankings are merely a by-product, so, its all about priority.
Yeah,
It mean, if i want to expedite authority and ranking, must increase frequency and content for my new site.
Thank you
Thanks for this pertinent information how we can refresh the content.
Thanks Jeffrey for the precise comment you made.
If we put RRS feed in a web page could that be considered as new content?
By placing an RSS feed in a web page will just alert search engines to content on your website, but to have an impact pages need to be added, or updated fairly regularly (reflected in the feed).
For blogs this is vital for “standing the test of time”. Content is king for optimizing your site.
totally agree that there is a tipping point that you reach after adding frequent fresh content. Once this point has reached google’s trusts your site more and the traffic just coming flooding in. It’s at this point I have found that you don’t even need to add fresh content anymore and still receive a good amount of traffic. Perhaps there is yet another level you can reach by continuing to add more frequent ne w content but I have yet to go for that second level as I have been satisfied with the traffic already given :)
What do you think about Frequent of New Content VS Number of Pages (I have read number of pages is also a factor) however a high Number of Pages can be reached by adding frequent fresh content anyway so perhaps that is the case
Agreed:
This is the ultimate objective of SEO (beyond the nuts and bolts). This is domain authority, I found the tipping point in our industry was 600 pages, but in others, it all depends on the competitors above you. Now, I can just add a blog post and 12 minutes later it is on page one “for keywords with hundreds of thousands of competing pages, and even some in the millions”.
It all depends on the density of the vector of content in your website. Each page counts and each word contributes doe to the way search engines parse the site (using inverse document frequency and a parametric statistical
model of word relatedness).
In other words, talk about it enough, you develop authority and can rank by affinity (dubbed in our water cooler as Ranking Credit).
And yes, the post frequency becomes less important once you are over the hump. Thanks for the stimulating conversation and feedback Andrew.
All the best.
I use to get a lot of SEO milage out of both and am surprised that the keywords meta tag has been scrapped. It amazed me how few websites even have decent meta tags.
Being an old post, still this blog post includes major points that are very essential for a successful content today.
Glad I came across this blog!