Many people believe that updating your website regularly is the way to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. This is not entirely true and I’ll explain why. As the web index grows bigger and bigger, search engines like Google and Bing are looking for better ways to determine what content is worth including in their index and which ones to drop. Duplicate content is obviously not going to work for rankings and if you’re rewriting content by saying the same thing in a different way, then this will not work as well. You need to be adding something original to your articles to make them stand out from all the other articles about the same subject. This is the long term strategy and will protect you against future algorithm changes just like Google Caffeine.
Now coming back to why updating your website/blog regularly is not worth it if you’re just recycling content, you need to understand how rankings come into the play. Links play an important role in increasings your SERPs but that’s not everything. Search engines try to provide the best results for any given query; that’s their aim and hence they make algorithm changes every now and then to refine the results you see for a more perfect match. If you were to do a cosmetic surgery for some reason or another, you would go to a professional, wouldn’t you? You would consider a surgeon who is known to deliver results and this can be checked by looking at the success rates and past customer experiences and the like. In the search engine world, the same principle applies. If you own a website about “cosmetic surgery”, then you would need to have pages which talk about the different kinds of surgery available, for example, liposuction, nose job, botox etc. By having multiple pages about the different aspects of “cosmetic surgery”, you show off your expertise in this area. You will be trusted in the “cosmetic surgery” industry and search engines will love you for that. This is how domain authority is achieved.
But wait, it’s not as simple as it looks though. If you’re not providing compelling and original content which is of value of visitors of your site, then you wouldn’t move up the rankings. Each new page that you put up on your site can be a boost for the ranking of your keywords only if it is on-topic and original. Google needs to think it’s good enough to keep in its index and by targetting related things to your keywords, you would increase your power of ranking for those keywords.
Creating new content on a daily/weekly/monthly basis can bring you extra traffic provided your content is unique. If these articles address related terms for the theme of your website, you will see move up the SERP over time as you gain more trust from the search engines due to the targetting of secondary keywords/long tail keywords. However if you’re adding articles just for the sake of keeping your website updated frequently, then you will not see any benefits from it.
New content will definitely bring GoogleBot to your site more often but after Google has crawled your new content, it won’t index it if it offers nothing of value. Therefore it is better to take the time required to write a good quality article rather than rushing to write dozens of articles which people are not going to appreciate. Don’t write for the sake of writing, write to address problems that your visitors may encounter, give information that will be helpful to the visitors and in time, you’ll reap the benefits of this long term strategy.