How Does Changing Website Content Improve Search Engine Page Rank?

Summary of the Test

The A-B test described in this paper showed that changing content makes a big difference: The website that changed its content twice a month was deep-crawled almost twice as often as the static website.

Changing a website’s content has been a consistent recommendation of SEO consultants3 but there has been no metric of the method. What happens if you do change content? Is there a measurement of before and after?

Our product, a NewsBox, provides a website with frequently changing content. We could find no tests that showed a before-after results. Prospective users asked what they could expect. What would change?

We constructed two websites, essentially identical, and gave one changing content. After two months of operation, we found that Google deep-crawled the changing content site about twice as much. Deep crawling involves looking through the entire site as opposed to just the home page.

If you want Google to know what’s new on your site, the test proved that changing the content frequently is a good idea.

Looking for Differences

Since our company’s product is a convenient way to generate changing content, many prospective users asked if we had any type of metric that indicated what they should expect if they installed the NewsBox. One prospective customer said, “We have at least one SEO consulting company calling us weekly with a new method of increasing our page search ranking. Tell us what to expect in numbers, not anecdotes.” The SEO tools that can show a track record of producing tangible results will be used more frequently. As the prospect added, “We like to know what our money buys.”

What Do Search Engines Look For?

There are dozens of methods to increase the popularity of websites. There are hundreds of tools that analyze the performance of a website. For illustration purposes, we’ll limit SEO to four items:

Backlinks: other websites that link to you.
Key words: how your content relates to what search engines see in your text.
Amount of Content: the amount of searchable information on your website.
Changing Content: information that changes periodically.

Since many websites are constantly modified, adding and moving information, a change in one of these factors may change the search rank of the web site1.