Is the frequency of updates on a blog important?

People, especially bloggers who are new at blogging, always think that blogs are good for SEO only if they are updated frequently. So how much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs or other sites? Isn’t the content more important than the simple number of posts per day or week? We all know that content is very important, but I will try to explain in details.

I would always say YES, content is much more important. So if you are thinking about for people, then a frequency might be a nice thing to have. If you show up on a blog everyday, and it has never been updated, and you are a person, then perhaps you don’t show up every single day, maybe you show up once a week. So people have noted that the more often you post, the more you have fresh content, to the degree where sometimes, some mega blogs will have like a new post every few hours, just so that any time you show up during the day, you will have something new to read. That is fantastic for users. Users like to see something different, not just the same static content, whenever they show up.

Even so, whenever you are thinking about search engines, it’s much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog I don’t post everyday. Sometimes I don’t post every week. However, I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it, or some kernel that’s going to be helpful to people, that is funny, that is interesting. If you need to take three weeks to do some research, and then that research results in a really good blog post, whether it be about the iPhone, or the Android market, or how well does Gmail do web spam or whatever it is. How much does Gmail detect spam compared to other webmail providers? Whatever it is, those original pieces of content often attract a lot more attention than those sort of follow-on blog posts where you are talking about, “Oh, I am the one hundredth person who wrote about an iPhone that got leaked, and I don’t really have any new or interesting different insights.” Or something like that. It’s a lot more interesting to take a bit more time. Think about sites like Techdirt. Mike Masnick doesn’t just follow the headlines and write about everything just to write about something. He waits until he has some insight, some unique angle, some of the value to add, some perspective that people haven’t really noticed on a particular story. And I think if as long as you are doing that on your blog, or on your website, it is going to be a lot more useful, it is going to attract a lot more links, and it is going to do much better in search engines. So don’t just pay attention to, “I have to have a certain frequency of update per day”, unless you are really trying to make a play to get a lot of users, and you are really caring about how people are going to be coming back to your site, as far as return visitors. If you are thinking about search engines, what is much more important is the quality of the content, rather than the frequency with which it is posted.

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