Is Tweaking Content So Necessary To SEO?
September 30th, 2005 by YzabelA thread currently going on the Searchenginewatch.com forums mentions having “to constantly review and change content and link up with credible link partners”. The emphasis here is to put on the word “change”. It’s not exactly changing content that one needs to do, but adding new content. One of the answers in the thread is pretty explicit when it comes to this matter:
If you change content on a page, as a friend yesterday was telling me he did, you’re liable to confuse the engines as to what your page is about.
The idea came about because of observations that Googlebot would return to spider pages that changed often, news pages and the like. This does not necessarily correlate with increased rankings on a phrase. Yes, it’s probably a good idea not to let your pages get stale, and to send out signals that your site is active. But constantly making changes to a page’s content isn’t the way to improve the rankings for that page.
What you really want to do is to add content (good enough that it’s worth linking to) to a site in the form of new pages that relate to your other pages. This adds new content for users, attracts inbound links, and provides a broader range of targets for the search engine indexes.
Besides, don’t visitors like to see new content, rather than the same old content rehashed every few weeks? Regularly updated content is also part of what makes people want to link to a website without the owner having to query for links.
(Link via SEO Book.)

