August 10th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

It’s true. Posting every day can have a negative impact on your search rankings. Before I explain what I’m talking about it’s probably best that I make this clear from the start – This post is aimed at people who are using blogs as a content management system, not those running a personal blog to engage with their visitors. As far as keeping your visitors attention goes there is some fairly conclusive evidence that regular, frequent posting helps. So if you’re looking to rank your content then read on:-

How Did I Find This Out?

I love my little experiments and what I was setting out to prove with this one was does post frequency affect how often your website gets spidered? I’d heard a myth about this several times so I wanted to see if it was real or not. Luckily for me I had the perfect 2 websites to test it so over a period of 8 weeks I created a split test.

On one domain I would post content once every 2 weeks. On the other I would make at least 2 posts every single day. Both domains were in the same niche and both domains would have content sourced from the same place (come on you didn’t think I’d be writing all those articles did you?) I would then monitor spider activity and actively check the indexes to see what pages were and were not being indexed.

After 8 weeks I had conclusive evidence. The blog with daily postings had no more spider activity than the blogs with once fortnightly posts. Even more significant was that only approximately every 6th post was being indexed and included in the search results. Every single post on my less frequently updated blog was indexed. This got me around to thinking that what IF this was a more important blog. Authors who post every day tend to have a similar pattern, some low quality posts, lots of average posts, 1 or 2 good posts. How would that stack up if the majority of the pages being indexed were in the low to medium category?

What Does Influence Spider Activity?

Because I was curious I decided to run a second experiment, this time for only 4 weeks. I wanted to see what does influence spider activity. I decided to carry on with my existing 2 blogs but switched them both to posting once a week. With one blog I would go out and actively build links for it. The other I left to its own devices.

It only took 2 weeks to see a drastic change in how often the search engine spiders where visiting. As I built links spider activity went through the roof. Not only were my pages ranking quicker (after 200 links I was seeing posts rank within 6 hours, 3 days for the other blog) but the content was ranking in the top 3 pages of the results as well. After a week as the first post on my blog the ranking was creeping ever up. Bingo. It seemed letting the content mature was working.

Why Posting Less Frequently Works

As a lot of people suspect what I’ve discovered is that spider activity seems to directly relate to your link profile i.e. your number and quality of inbound links. So if you’re posting every day and have a bad link profile then the search engines aren’t actually seeing your new posts on the front of your blog – your most important page. Even if they do spider it on the home page once by the next time they come around it’s nowhere to be seen, that post either needs to garner some backlinks from elsewhere or it’s gone. If you’ve spent time crafting that post then that’s a bit of a crapper.

The key to this seems to be matching your posting frequency to your linking profile. As you gain more and more backlinks then posting every day, or even 5 times a day for that matter is fine. Your content will rank. With enough backlinks you can post and check Google 10 minutes later to find your content ranked. To do this though you must have the backlinks in place. Posting every day in the belief that your new content will increase spider activity is a waste of time and may in fact be doing more harm than good.

The lesson for all you new guys and gals is simple, rather than concentrating on posting every day you should spend at least as much time researching and gaining quality links. Once you’ve got the links you can increase your post frequency.

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Paul B