Updating A Blog Can Damage It’s Search Engine Rankings
By admin on Nov 21, 2008 in Blogging Tips
That might sound crazy, but its true. I have a number of niche blogs with just 5-10 posts on them which all receive a small but constant trickle of traffic from Google to earn about a dollar a day each. I have left some of them for upwards of 3 months without any new content because they were sitting there adding a few dollars to the pot quite nicely.
I’ve found that adding a single new post to a blog that hasn’t been updated for some time (at least a month) can “upset the balance”, causing a change in the keywords it ranks for - not always for the best.
As you probably know one of Google’s ranking factors is how new the content is. Generally a blog that is updated daily will be given slightly higher rankings for all their posts, simply because they are keeping up with the times and so are more likely to be relevant to what people are searching for. Adding one new post is not enough to gain this “freshness bonus”; all it serves is to alter the keyword ratios (retro!) on the Homepage by pushing a previous post off the Homepage.
This theory only applies to small niche blogs that are seemingly “dead” but where the owner knows differently. There’s no way adding a new post to a continuously updated site like Mashable would decrease its rankings
Don’t capsize your blog with a badly timed paddle stroke!
How Can An Old Niche Blog Be Updated Without Damage?
1. Don’t leave the blog without new content for that long in the first place. Keep it being seen as a fresh up to date blog. This may seem like the most sensible option but often the whole point of having a small niche blog is so you don’t have to keep updating them.
2. Add several posts. This is something well worth experimenting with. For example would it be better to add 5 new posts at once or to write 5 posts and stagger them, publishing one per week? With a flagship blog with loyal readers its obvious to stagger them, but that’s not necessarily the best way with a small niche blog. Both give different impressions to Google, but adding 5 or more posts to a blog that only has 5 posts in the first place gives a good chance that something will make it though to getting rankings that bring more traffic than before.
3. Don’t update the niche blog at all and just build a brand new one instead!
Blog Rhythms
Every blog has its own SEO Rhythm, which the owner needs to understand. I once sold a blog that had been doing great as long as it was updated every week. I had experimented myself and found if it wasn’t updated weekly it would lose its main rankings and traffic would plummet. I told the new owner this but I was ignored and I watched the site drop right down the SERPS.
Every blog is different, work with your experience and try new things out, keeping in mind that a new post doesn’t always mean more traffic.
Interesting post. Who would’ve thought that updating a blog after a long while would ruin things. I would think that when the crawls slow down, it would hurt the most. lol.
-Mike
My blog ticks over pretty well and I update it several times per day :o)
I have gone for weeks at a time though without posting, my subscribers still have a look every day for ages.
x
Hi Matt..
This posting is great. A very good advice. I’ll link this posting to my blog. I can see that not all posting will have the keywords that user will search in the search engines. If we know the keywords that makes our blogs popular, we better make more posting about that. But if we are not going to update the blogs frequently, let those keywords in the front page of our blogs.
The only reason you add new content to a niche blog is to increase your niche keywords ranking. The reason why your traffic reduces when you update a blog after a long while is that cuz you get most of the traffic to the homepage and when you post more to the blog, the homepage density changes and it affects rankings.
I have noticed on my recipe blog as well
Only if I knew this earlier..lol
Whenever you change the frontpage you are going to have this issue.
One could put up a static frontpage to help the issue perhaps.
Hi Matt,
I do think that you are always thinking, and that is a great thing. However, I think you are being mislead here. Updating a blog with new content does not have any effects on keyword ranking.
The only change that you may notice would be directly on the home page of the blog. But that would only be the case if you haven’t added static content to it that would enable you to rank for the keyword phrases you want.
To help you with this, I would suggest adding content directly to your index.php file of your blog. Around 200 to 400 words should be fine. From there below your intro content (if you want to call it that) I would recommend displaying only the excerpts of your posts. Make sure the post title uses the H2 heading tag and don’t display any tags or category links below the excerpt.
Allow Google to successfully index your post page, from there it will continuously re-crawl that post page looking for updates and each time it will gain a deeper crawl. Eventually Google will find your tag links and index them as well.
All in all, you shouldn’t be experiencing this problem. As you know too, I own a few hundred niche blogs and by applying some simple seo techniques, you should start to see a difference.
Hey Garry great to hear from you!
I do see exactly what you mean about adding static content to keep the Homepage ranking much more stable (rather than depending on the content of the latest posts), I have used that to some extent but a much shorter length you suggest (more like a short sentence in H2 tags acting as a sort of sub-heading for the site). I will definitely try out your advice.
It looks your advice could help some of the commenters too.
Thanks, glad to hear from you, it’s been a while!
Matt
I believe that you are wrong.
It’s the change of content that is damaging the page’s search rankings, not the update of the blog.
A real test would require control over your variables and a control, of which you have none. Please do further research and understand what you are talking about before misleading the public.
I would agree with Garry’s suggestions, and suggest that you should discuss and further explore these ideas in future blog posts.
All the Best.
TY
They are the same thing… updating the blog results in changing the content that is on the Homepage. However, yes ultimately its the change of content on the Homepage that causes a change in Homepage ranking - updating the blog is one way to cause that (if there isnt static content to act as an ‘anchor’.
Did you try Gary’s advice?
Hi Craig,
I have done, he is correct.
When he says:
“The only change that you may notice would be directly on the home page of the blog. But that would only be the case if you haven’t added static content to it that would enable you to rank for the keyword phrases you want.”
I hadn’t added static content to the Homepages of my niche blogs before and so I was experiencing my blogs Homepage rankings change if I added new posts (just as Garry says the would due to the lack of static content) . - Me and Garry were both right - he has the better solution!
I have a new blog I am trying to promote. Do readers comments have an effect on your search engine ranking? Do comments even get indexed?
Very interesting post, I never took into account that the amount of blog posts could effect my ranking.