April 13th 2006 02:03 pm
How Often Should A Website Be Updated?
I received an email from a client wondering about how often a website should be updated…” I have been reading Florida Realtor magazines and they suggest I should be “touching” my web site every other week to keep it fresh.”
My response….
The idea the a website should be “touched” or updated frequently is for the most part an old-wives tale I am sorry to say. Most of the so-called experts who recommend such a thing actually have no idea what the roots of the frequent updating pastime are and are just repeating something they heard from someone else years ago.
Many, many years ago (9 to be exact) the most favorite search engine on the internet was AltaVista and AltaVista’s spider would “learn” which websites were updated often and then return to re-spider those websites more often than websites that were not updated often. It was thought at that time that if a spider returned to your website more often then your website would rank higher (which was not true anyway).
Along came the template website industry and they needed to find some benefits to sell to prospective customers. Since just about the only thing a template site has to offer is that it allows an agent access to the website to make changes themselves whenever they want - the idea that a website should be updated frequently to be more successful was a perfect fit! The fact that any changes done to a template site could not be spidered by search engines anyways was ignored and the “spin” was changed a bit so the idea became just updating - period - was a good thing. So, the idea that websites should be updated frequently in order for a website to be successful grew legs and started to run because it helped sell template sites.
Altavista stopped being the most popular search engine on the planet many years ago - well before the turn of the century but the myth of frequent updating has been kept alive by the template site providers. All of it is unnecessary. Actually, “Guerrilla Marketing” says the opposite - that marketing should not be changed - that the public never tires of your old campaign and changes actually cause you to lose prospective customers - that the biggest mistake marketers make is making changes just for the sake of change.
I have clients who have not touched their website in 9 years! In fact, they hesitate to do so because they think making changes could ruin the good thing they have going - if it works why make changes? The fact that they have made no changes in 9 years has not hurt them at all - of course it wouldn’t since the idea that a website should be frequently updated is not valid and is not based on any sound marketing or SEO ideas.
Actually nowadays Google looks upon changes with suspicion and if you make big enough changes they will actually drop your site from the search results for several months until they make sure you are not trying to “game” them and that your website’s focus is essentially the same.
So, relax! You have no reason to waste your time fiddling with your website - go sell some houses instead 
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2 Responses to “How Often Should A Website Be Updated?”
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Richard McCollim on 15 Dec 2006 at 7:38 pm #
Although I understand your intent is that changing websites just to impress a search engine is not beneficial, it comes across as advising not to change the site much at all. However, a responsible real estate agent should update listings and photos of current homes for sale (imagine trying to impress a buyer client with a home from 2002); make changes to community information, such as a community calendar; update articles and newsletters; and even update advice according to the market. Yes, their background info, introduction, general template, and so forth might remain unchanged.
PS I had to create a blog just to respond to this. Do you have any ideas how to make it a useful marketing tool?
Doug Towes on 18 Apr 2007 at 7:52 pm #
This from a Blog interview with Matt Cutts from Google by a Chinese blogger.
Question: Some SEOs believe that freshness plays an important role in Google ranking. Many think blogs are easier to rank better due to freshness. Yet some SEOs think it’s not a good idea to tweak web pages frequently.
What do you suggest? Update web pages often, or no?
Matt Cutt’s Answer: It depends on the industry that you are in. I would do whatever makes the most sense for your users. Just changing a page more often for the sake of having a page change is probably not very productive. But if you have a blog, then posting more often might attract more users. So for some people it might make sense to change the page less often (a manufacturing company, for example), while for some people it will make sense to change the page often to attract more visitors (e.g. if you are a blogger).