The Importance of Fresh Content

Google hates sites that stagnate and have the same old content that Google's spiders have already crawled. What is Google's main purpose? If you think about it logically, Google and the other search engines were created to be able to supply the user with the most accurate, interesting and current information for the search query that is used in the Search Engines.

This means that if your site becomes stagnant (content wise) and you have only your old outdated content on the site, Google and other search engines will not necessarily keep crawling your site. Adding new content to your site often ensures that SE spiders will know that they have to crawl and index your content regularly.

The more content you have on your site, the more industry related information you will have. Consequently, the more industry information you have, the more opportunity you will get to include your industry keywords in this SEO content. As a result, the more industry keywords you have in your content, the more keywords you will rank for in Google. It makes sense for overall SEO, doesn't it.

Remember how I referred to ‘fresh' and ‘unique' content the whole time up there? This is a very important point to keep in mind when adding content to your site. Many site owners use the internet to keep tabs on industry news and they read up on what's new in their industry. This is very important and will help you to keep abreast of any industry related advancements. Where many site owners make a massive mistake though, is to take this news or information and add it to their websites verbatim.

This is not a good idea!

Google has put in place something called the ‘duplicate content penalty'. This duplicate content penalty will not be used to ban your site altogether from Google; in most cases anyway. The way the duplicate penalty works in the instance of copying and pasting content from other sites is like this:
Once content has been published to the internet on whatever site, Google and the other SE's will crawl this content and index it. Now, when you take this content from the site and place it word for word on your own site, there will now be two pages of the exact same content. Firstly, having two pages of the exact same content is of no use to anyone. Secondly, the content that was copied and pasted will be crawled by the SE spiders and it will be compared to the content already existing in the SE's index. Once the SE sees that this content already exists elsewhere, it will ignore this content and you will probably have a hard time ranking well for the keywords and phrases used in this content.

What a waste of a page right?

Now there are many discussions on how often a site's content should be updated, but many are of the opinion that as long as the site is being updated on a regular basis, it should be fine. This means that you can add new content to your site once a week, once a month or even once every three months, as long as it is done consistently. This way the SE spiders will know that they need to visit your site in these chosen intervals. It is of course better to have SE spiders visit your site every week rather than once every three months.

There is a very good way to make sure that your site is updated regularly - get a company Blog! Google loves blogs! Why you ask? Remember what Google's main goal is? A blog is updated very regularly with entirely unique content; this is what Google craves.

So there you have it, update that site of yours with fresh and unique content at regular intervals. Don't ‘scrape' existing content from other web pages and add it to your own site. Even better, create a company blog that lives on your site's URL and get everyone in the company to write a piece on their specific expertise within the company.