Benefits Of Regularly Updating Home Page Options

[-=seth=-]

How much benefit, in search engine terms, can regular updating of a homepages content actually achieve, on a weekly basis I rewrite the text on my homepage, I tell myself it keeping the page fresh for my visitors, but the truth is if I’m honest its purely for the benefit of search engines.

However for the last few weeks as a test I’ve discontinued my weekly update and as yet haven’t noticed any change, I was wondering if anybody else has conducted similar tests, what their findings were, and what are your opinions on the subject

[Randy]

There is no SEO benefit to constantly updating content Seth. It's one of those myths that has seemingly taken on a life of its own after being repeated so many times.

If you have a news site so your targeted keywords are constantly changing it might bring some benefit, but that's about it. Known news sites do get spidered more often because the search engines understand their content is constantly changing. But still, more frequent spidering does not have anything at all to do with ranking well on a static phrase.

In fact if your targeted keyword phrases are static and don't change all the time, the constant updating can actually be detrimental if you're not very, very careful. If you change the focus of a page too much it can stop ranking for your most prized phrases since they may no longer be a prominent part of your copy.

In other words, if you sell Red Lederhosen and that's it there is no need to update your content ever, let alone on a weekly basis. Or I should say there is no reason to do so for the search engines. There are other non-SEO reasons you might want to tweak your content.

[Scottie]

How much benefit, in search engine terms, can regular updating of a homepages content actually achieve, on a weekly basis I rewrite the text on my homepage, I tell myself it keeping the page fresh for my visitors, but the truth is if I’m honest its purely for the benefit of search engines.

That's a pointless waste of your time. Will it make the Googlebot visit more often? Yes. But if the content doesn't say anything significantly different, you can actually do more harm than good by shuffling things around... a consistent page makes it easy for a search engine to recommend it for a specific topic. One that changes often could easily be about a different subject every day...

[Jill]

I'm not sure why this myth refuses to die!

[jehochman]

Because it's a way for tossers to charge the client every month for unnecessary content edits.

[piskie]

A lot of the above "Refuting" seems to assume that these regular changes will be major and would destroy the Page focus.

If the changes don't dilute the intended Focus of the Home Page, then the benefit will (possibly) be that Googlebot for one would visit more regularly and in doing so, any new pages will (again probably) be picked up and indexed sooner. These changes could simply be Forthcoming Events for example. With such changes there would appear to be possible gains with no downside.

So my oppinion is that if you ignore the "Myth Crushing" responses, the answer is "Some benefit could be forthcoming" providing any such changes are kept within appropriate limits.

[Jill]

So my oppinion is that if you ignore the "Myth Crushing" responses, the answer is "Some benefit could be forthcoming" providing any such changes are kept within appropriate limits.

Yeah, but what have you seen happen for real?

[Randy]

But before you go to any of these measures designed simply to get the spiders to come by more often it would be wise to know how many times per week on average the spiders are already hittiing those pages.

People say PR makes a difference in the spidering frequency. Google even says it, though they're referring to their internal PR numbers not the Toolbar stuff. People say having fresh content increases spidering, which is true up to a point.

But on the other hand since I actually track spider accesses on my sites I can give you an example of one of my lowly(?) Toolbar PR5 sites on which the home page content has not changed one iota in something like 3 years. Over the last 2 months Googlebot has grabbed the index page an average of 5 days out of 7 each week; Slurp has grabbed it 3 days out of each week; MSN has grabbed it an average of 4 times each week; and Ask has grabbed it an average of 3 times each week.

So without me doing anything special I can be fairly confident that any change I make to this page is going to be picked up in just a couple of days maximum by all of the search engines. Which means there is no need for me to do anything different than I've been doing with it for the last several years.

Moral of the story? Know where you stand before you start making more work for yourself. Otherwise the work may not help you gain anything, and you can't get the time back once you've spent it.