Will I Lose My SEO Rankings If I Stop Updating My Website Regularly? A mini experiment conducted!
This subject has been something on my mind for quite long now. We have been taught that we need to post regularly on our blog with fresh content so that Google will continue to rank us on the search engines.
So what happens if we stopped posting for a week? How about a month? Will my traffic drop? Will Google stop listing my website on search engines?
I decided to put my blog to the test. I was also partially busy to upkeep my blog with new posts and decided to put it on a hiatus status when I first started this experiment.
I ended my streak just yesterday when I posted my first post of the year. The last post was on the last day of December.
The results?
The first point was in December, all the way until April 28 (When this post is released, a few more days for april's stats to go up anyway!)
If you noticed, my traffic remained fairly consistent. Slight dip in February which I would say due to a shorter month, but it fairly the same as January. Even when not posting content, my traffic increased from February to March.
Now that being said, I'm not saying stop posting content and wait for traffic to flow in.
Especially if you are new to this, you would need to post regularly. My best advice is to keep a schedule - every 2-3 days, weekly, bi weekly, whatever fits your schedule the best. I don't recommend to stop posting altogether but if you do feel like you're getting burnt out, go on a slower schedule. Slow and steady wins the race.
The more you post, the more chances you can rank for long tail keywords. However, don't fret or worry if you need to stop for any reason because traffic just doesn't disappear overnight. Stick to what the lessons teach and you will be guaranteed to keep these traffic for a long time.
Some of my tops in Google still, despite me not posting on my blog for 4 months:
My website is incomefromthereddot.com
1. Shoemoney (Keyword: Shoemoney Review)
2. Featurepoints (Keyword: Featurepoints Review)
3. Beermoney (Keyword: Beermoney)
4. Panel App (Keyword: Panel App Review)
One more thing I should mention about PLUGINS
I also noticed a lot of newbies who seem to worry about the number of plugins on their site. To be honest, you have nothing to worry about. I run about 20+ plugins just fine without too much problem. The only thing that you should worry about is if a plugin is slowing down your website a lot
The only reason you want to check by getting this plugin called 'P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)'. It tells you how each plugin is performing and the amount of loading speed time each plugin affects.
If a particular plugin is slowing down your site a lot, you can try to find out for the root of the problem. If not, disable it or find an alternative for it if you can.
That's it from me! Hope you enjoyed my short article!
Recent Comments
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Yup, I guess it really depends on whether those plug-ins slow down load speed. Obviously you can have several light plug-ins and they won't affect its speed too much, even though your website health rating here may tell you otherwise!
Hey Thomas, thanks a lot! Just wanted to share with everyone about this result. I find too many newbies worrying about the smallest details when it really doesn't matter that much!
That's right, I haven't added much to my website in a while. So I was pleased when I logged onto to Jaaxy just now, only to see that most of my pages and posts had actually increased significantly in Google ranking!
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Very interesting and helpful post, thanks!