While researching a story this weekend for our Monday News at Noon, Industry in Focus Reporter Eric Miller and Associate Editor Catherine Frenzel came across a retailers website where the last update was apparently sometime in 2008.
This brings up an important point. There are way too many websites out there – some of them belonging to businesses in the Manufactured Housing industry – that haven’t been updated in years.
They once had good ranking in searches for their keywords, but lately have been eclipsed by new material competing for those same keywords.
That should come as no surprise. As Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” Websites that haven’t been updated recently fail on both counts.
There have been ongoing discussions on dating web pages and articles. And that might make a difference to end users. But the search engines (SEs) have no problem in determining the age of a file. When a search engine robot (spider) scans a website, it records a variety of information about each page including it’s file date.
Every file is automatically tagged with a file date as it is uploaded to (or saved to) the web server.
Some folks try to fool the SE’s by overwriting files with new copies of the same file, but to no avail as the filename, content and file date are all captured by the spider and newly dated files are easily compared to older files bearing the same name. New date + same content = no credit for new material.
SEs love fresh content. Their very purpose is to serve their users the best and most recent content they can find that most closely matches the searcher’s request.
The reason why SEs seem to favor blogs in their results in not the simple fact that they are a blog, but that blogs tend to be updated much more often than static websites.
While there are many good reasons to have static pages on your site, if no part of the site has been updated recently, the SEs may have reason to conclude that your site is no longer active. And by active, they mean that the site is not being updated on a regular basis.
That could be enough to allow your competitors to pass you on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your keywords. And that could directly impact the results you receive from your website.
There must be something that your business does every week or month that is newsworthy in your local area or field of interest. Be sure that every accomplishment makes it to your website and to relevant online press release sites.
Keep your website’s content fresh and hold your position on the SERPs and maybe even climb up a notch or two… or don’t and watch your competition climb over you.