For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks

[CSOD1999]

For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings?  I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices?  Content is expensive.  Thanks

[elephantseo]

Yes

[CSOD1999]

I'm trying to provide evergreen, thought leadership content with the occasional product review - about 500 words each, decent quality.  Do you think 2x a week, niche notwithstanding, is frequent enough to keep rankings up, i.e. we have a fresh, active site?

Thanks

[elephantseo]

This is really a determination based on your strategy and who the consumer is. Two examples that are both successful but take complete different approaches are Huffington Post (multiple pieces per day) and The Oatmeal (once a month).

Are you trying to get into Google news? Then you are going to need 2-3 pieces per day.

[Goetzman]

I recommend updating content once or twice a week, make sure you don't go overboard with keyword jamming. content and photos are key to longterm success.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Content can be expensive, but can also be a necessary evil for you, if you aren't able to do this yourself. Writing just for the sake of it could be a very bad move because, as Dejan has already mentioned, it could trigger the new algorithm from Google, and that could spell you problems.

Best not to bother than write something poor

[Dan-Petrovic]

You could spit out 10,000 bad content pieces and earn no more rankings than with one extraordinary item per month. Frequency of content update and adding of fresh content affects search engines signals broader (or different) to the one's impacting rankings alone (look up QDF). How content in a technical sense can help is if it earns links and through internal linking. My advice is not to create content if it doesn't make sense to do so, especially if it's of a low quality and empty meaningful sentences, you'll just end up with a low quality site which could trigger Google's new algo filter.