Website update frequency as ranking factor

[nyanainc]

Hellooo,

Anyone have more info about this issue? I own 1 e commerce site, and one blog about soccer. Both are brand new, e commerce is older few months, with more backlinks and soccer blog with very few profile links from soccer forums. The soccer blog, was updated regularly 2 times per day, and I saw a tremendous rise on visits. Later on , I stop to update it, and then traffic drop immediately . Notice that I stop to build links at least 1 week before I stop to post content. But the site still enjoyed an increase in traffic even after I stop to add fresh links , and traffic dropped once I stop to create fresh content. The other e commerce site, wasn't updated at all, but I was building links  and I saw similar increase in traffic. Niche of the e commerce is very boring (industrial) and none of competitors own a blog. Site is quite big, with not even half of links from competitors but I almost outrank them all with internal linking on competitive keywords. (note that site have over 200 pages with at least 300 words each in contrast with competitor sites of 20 pages). Then I added a blog and I saw similar increase in traffic with the soccer blog. Once I stop to update again the blog, traffic dropped again.. anyone with similar experiences?

[nyanainc]

Well, now I realise whats going on. Mainly the posts on the soccer blog are news related to recent football matches. Probably the site was appearing in the news section of Google... soon I will start again to work on him and I can post updates if anyone is interested ... So I guess , if I start to add High PA & DA authority links ( instead of weak forum profiles) + fresh content, soon the site is going to have massive traffic. Seems that related links, + fresh content rocks

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Nik. A component of Google's algo is Query Deserves Freshness and searcher side, people only looking for recent content, both of which could be at play when you're producing new content related to recent events.  There's an older whiteboard Friday that discusses the general concept here: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness, and that still applies today.

An interesting examination of how QDF can affect rankings was done by Doctor Pete in a blog post from 2013 (as a portion of the rest of it here: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshnesshttp://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update), but here are some of the main points quoted:

Google was viewing a search for "kaufman" as informational and generic, returning results for Andy Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman, cities named Kaufman, etc. A disambiguation box on the SERP even makes it clear that Google has trouble interpreting the query.

After the story about Andy Kaufman broke, the SERP changed dramatically:

• CNN
• IMDB (Charlie Kaufman)
• CNN
• Wikipedia (Kaufman, TX)
• Fox News
• KaufmanCounty.net
• RobertKaufman.com
• KaufmanCo.com
• US Today
• NY Daily News

Where there were no news-related organic results before, news articles now accounted for half of the top ten, including the #1 and #3 spots. You may have heard the term "QDF" (Query Deserve Freshness) in the SEO world. What's interesting here is that QDF is not something that's just on or off for any particular query. A query that was relatively static transformed overnight because of new information. In other words, Google decided in real-time that this informational query was now a news query, simply based on new data and content.

Regular blogging can trigger this, and several other factors. Cheers!