Google Answers: Does Adding Content Daily Improve Rankings?

Google responds to the question of whether publishing content on a daily basis improves ranking.

During an SEO office hours hangout, someone asked if adding content on a regular basis helped with ranking.

It’s a good question because it’s widely assumed that regularly publishing content is a good idea because it keeps readers returning for more.

Is Daily Publishing Beneficial to Rankings?

This is the question: 

“Does posting one piece of content per day help your ranking?”

It’s unclear who answered the question at Google.

Google provided the following response:

“No.

Posting on a daily or even weekly basis will not help you rank higher in Google search results.

Nevertheless, the more pages you have in the Google index, the more likely it is that your content will appear in search results.”

Does Google Helpful Content Update Change Rankings?

Crawling: The More Pages Indexed, the Better

It has been noted in recent years that Google does not crawl all content.

And if the content isn’t crawled, it won’t be indexed, which is critical for ranking.

The overall quality of a website is one of the reasons Google may not crawl that content.

According to Google’s John Mueller:

“We are not sure about the quality of many websites so we do not crawl them.

So that’s something I’ve noticed us struggling with, especially on newer sites. 

And I’ve heard people say things like, “Well, it’s technologically feasible to create a website with a million pages because we have a database that we just put online.”

And just by doing that, we’ll find a lot of these pages from one day to the next, but we’ll be like, “We’re not certain of the quality of these pages yet.”

And we’ll be more careful about crawling and indexing them until we’re confident in their quality.”

Indexed: More Likely to Rank

Getting crawled is the first step toward ranking.

The next step is to get that crawled content indexed, which appears to be becoming increasingly difficult for some publishers.

The first tip was to ensure that the pages could be crawled and that there was no technical reason why the site couldn’t be crawled.

He recommended crawling your site to see how easily pages could be crawled. If the server is unable to serve the webpages, a site crawler such as Screaming Frog will display 500 errors.

Check your Search Console for 500 errors as well, as this is a common indicator that the web host is having difficulty serving webpages.

Google helpful content update is now complete

His second recommendation was to publicize the pages that are having difficulty being indexed.

He added, 

“And, if it’s well-optimized for search engines, the next thing I’d think about is what you can do to enhance your website even more effectively.

…So that when our systems examine your website, they conclude, “Oh, this is a legitimate small business.”

We should make an effort to index everything.

Because, especially if we’re talking about a smaller website with a couple of hundred pages, that feels like something where we’ll go off and get everything if we have a little bit of a hint.

If you’re talking about an e-commerce site with 500,000 pages, it’s a different story whether we get all of those pages or not.”

He suggested that internal linking be used to assist Google in determining which content is essential.

Mueller said:

“Another thing is that internal linking is critical for us to understand what you consider important on a website. 

Things like links from the home page, for example, are typically a sign that you care about these pages, and perhaps we should care about them more.”

He also suggested focusing less on quantity and more on content quality.

His advice:

“On the one hand, making it simple for us to identify important content on a website is a great idea.

Which sometimes means producing less content while producing better content. 

Having fewer pages that you want to be indexed.”

The popularity of Content and Prolific Publishing

When readers are deeply invested in a topic, they can become obsessed with discovering new content.

When a reader has a strong engagement with a topic, content can be like eating popcorn – they can’t stop reading it and keep coming back for more.

There’s a reason why so much content has been written about Star Wars media and Marvel films.

People who are interested in a topic are more likely to click through when they see an article on that topic in the search results, Google News, or Google Discover.

And determining what types of content are important to readers (as indicated by how many readers engaged with the articles and recommended them) is critical.

So it’s not always about constantly publishing content, it starts with figuring out what matters the most to the readers.

That means experimenting with new topics every now and then to see if readers are interested in them.

Readers do not always engage with new topics. But every now and then, a new topic becomes popular, and you add that topic to your list of article topics to write.

According to a report published by the New York Times in 2021, over 5 million subscriptions are for their news product. However, the New York Times has over 1.6 million subscribers for non-news digital content such as cooking and games.

This is the observation made about their earnings in the 2021 New York Times article:

“The news product, The Times’ primary digital offering, obtained 1.7 million subscribers, a 48 percent higher over 2019. In accordance with The Times, the news product alone has over five million subscribers. Other digital offerings, for instance, the Cooking and Games apps, gained over 600,000 subscriptions in 2020, representing a 66 percent increase for a total of approximately 1.6 million.”

Who would have guessed that a significant number of New York Times readers would be more interested in recipe content than in core news content?

Building a readership or ranking in Google requires more than just writing keyword-optimized content.

It is critical to identify the topics that are important to readers.

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