Will frequently updating my web pages improve my rankings?

• I have several pages that previously ranked very well but have slowly been dropping. I haven't updated these pages in months. How important is frequently updating my pages to achieving high search engine rankings?

Answer: Taking an existing page and rewriting it's contents to make it fresh will not boost that page's rankings. The same goes for streaming an RSS feed onto a page so the content is always changing. That has no impact on rankings whatsoever.

A page's position in the rankings is determined on other merits, such as the page's inbound links, along with on-page factors like keyword placement in your content, title tags, headlines, and so forth.

On the other hand, adding new content pages in the form of articles, resources or blog posts can increase your search engine traffic. You create more indexable content for the search engines to crawl, as well as attract more links. For great tips on how to build new content for your web site be sure to read the following reports...

• The Easiest Way to Build a Content-Rich web site
  
  
• How to Create and Promote Buzz to Turbo Charge your web site Rankings

Frequently adding new content pages to your site will also get the search engines crawling your site more regularly, which can help you get more pages indexed faster. But it's very important that the content be useful or interesting enough that it can attract links on its own. Pages with few inbound links tend to slip out of Google's index before long and your hard work creating that content would basically be wasted.

Crawling frequency is primarily determined by the quality of that page's inbound links. As long as the page has some good incoming links, it's going to be crawled more than enough to maintain its rankings without ...