Re: SEO factor affecting web visibility in search results ?

[djdaniel150]

@paulie I think you misunderstood what I was trying to state. I meant that new content does not necessarily rank higher than content from 10 years ago. Although, Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that you shouldn’t leave a website idle with no updates for months on end. Hubpages started setting their “hubs” (articles) to idle if they haven’t been updated for too long of a period of time. This makes no sense. They have plenty of new content on a daily basis. Its best to either create new content and possibly update old content when possible. However, I know from my own experience that changing your content can cause you to lose a pages rank as based on keywords. This happens alot. I’ve seen time and time again on Google’s webmaster forums people complaining that they lost 95% of their organic traffic after redesigning their sites. This isn’t because they changed their sites appearance, its because they changed their sites content. Anytime you change your content, then Google takes you through the entire process of matching your content to keywords to be returned to users. This is also part of what caused whateverlife .com’s organic traffic to plummet earlier this year. They redesigned the site and its overall content, also the site crashed like god knows how many times, but its definitely not been in good shape, thats for sure.

Change your content = Lose your rank and start all over again. “If it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it!” That’s my motto.

I have one website I have made no changes to in 4 years and it ranks for 28 sets of keywords, yet its a localized site that consists of only 4 pages. The HTML even has errors in it, the site looks like crap, but it gets over a 1,000 visitors a month from people looking for piano lessons in st louis