What is the SEO Impact of Changing a Site Often?

Is changing content often good from a search perspective? This question is discussed at WebmasterWorld and a lot of good information is dispensed.

First of all, "changing" content should be considered carefully. It could potentially hurt your rankings, according to Tedster:

If a url depends significantly on on-page factors for its ranking on a given search, then changing that content can even undermine those rankings.

It's important to acknowledge that changing content is not a good thing, necessarily. Instead, you should *add* content.

Don't change your page too much. Instead, focus on building other pages.

If you change your page from just "trophy" to grab things like "trophies" and "trofies" (for people who can't spell) you divide all the focus of the page between those different iterations. You are dividing up the amount of emphasis you put on any one of the word sets. Themeing really comes into play. If you are worried about ranking for different variations of a phrase, create additional pages of content / links for those different variations. Sure it's a pain, but it's a solid tactic.

That's some really good advice. The more content, the more loved you are. That's how it typically works.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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posted Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Optimization at February 20, 2008 9:39 AM Comments (6)

Comments

Interesting. I recently was stumped because I had top placement for my keyword. Then I added a descriptive paragraph and the ranking left. Now wondering if I should go back to the older less informative page.

Posted by Jason Forthofer at February 20, 2008 13:44

Jason, I'm guessing that your top placement was in MSN?

Posted by Rob Abdul at February 22, 2008 04:23

Rob, MSN isn't that bad. Not to mention they wouldn't have enough search traffic to actually send searchers for those misspellings in the first place. Unless of course they do take Yahoo! over. :)

Jason, links are always going to be better than changes to the actual page content. A good amount of targeted anchor text links will destroy any "mistake" of web page copy or content.

Thus you can cover your SEO "mistakes" with links. Works every time I have done it. This is also the only way a full flash website can rank for anything.

But its obviously better to do both if you have the time.

Cheers,

-Bart Gibby

Posted by Bart Gibby at February 22, 2008 13:14

You need to keep a certain amount of keywords in your content, but you should update content frequently.

Posted by No Name at February 24, 2008 09:25

Thanks guys, I'll try that. The keyword terms was actually on google, ranked third. Now I'm on page 8. I'll I did was add a descriptive paragraph.

Posted by Jason Forthofer at February 26, 2008 15:59

So in this case what about news websites that have some pages changed very often? It seems that most search engines actually like this...

Posted by No Name at April 29, 2009 07:23