Content updates and page rank

Do web page updates affect ranking?

It is a common question to ask, whether updating your website pages frequently will affect you page rankings.  The answer is a simple yes.  Updating a website frequently will definitely have some bearing on the PageRank and other search engine ratings.  However, the effect itself is dependent on the updates made, not on the fact of the update itself.  But let’s look at it a little more closely.

If a spider visits you site on the 1st of the month, and nothing new has been added, the spider may not come back again for a couple of days, or a week, or however long is the normal crawl interval.  On the other hand, if it crawls the site on the first, and finds newly updated pages, it is far more likely to return sooner, because you have demonstrated that the the site is dynamic, and needs to be investigated again to determine the frequency of the updates.  The more often the pages are changed, the more often, in turn, the site is likely to be crawled.  And while this gives you the opportunity to climb (or fall) in the SERPS faster, the frequency of the crawling itself has nothing to do with those rankings.

To have any effect on your actual rankings and ratings, you have to make changes in the updated page that influence the algorithms of search engines.  These could take many forms, from simply adding or changing meta tags, to changing the keywords, to completely rewriting the content of the page itself.  Realistically, a drastic change in the keywords used could have a detrimental effect, especially if (and they should) your backlinks use keyword weighted anchor text.  You’d either have to change your page keywords to match the anchor text of backlinks, or make sure that the backlinks were updated as well, which is not as likely to happen on a frequent basis.  However, if the page is updated to better reflect the anchor links that refer to your site, or the text of the page is optimized with those keywords, it’s possible to make sudden improvements to your page ranking.

In either case, by making sure that your site is frequently updated, you are likely to increase how often search engine spiders come crawling.  And each time they visit, the possibility of a postive change is presented.  The key is be sure that each update is done to improve how your page affects the search engine algoritms, working towards more and more improvement.  And in the end, each improvement makes the page more interesting for your human visitors, and that is what having the website is all about.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com