In the recently concluded Google’s Office-hours Hangout for September 2022, one of the viewers asked if publishing content on a daily basis help improve rankings of a website. It is a good question, and something that website owners around the world have either often heard or engaged in the practice. But does it actually help boost a website’s rankings? No, was the prompt response that was given by someone from Google. Further adding that even though publishing daily content doesn’t help improve rankings, it does, however, help in getting more and more page out in Google’s index, which in turn is beneficial for somebody who wants to improve their chances of improving their search engine performance. Let’s look at how the discussion went down along with some of the earlier responses on related topics from the ever so dependable, John Mueller.
So, does publishing daily content improve search rankings?
“Does posting one content daily increase ranking?” was the question that was asked.
To which someone from Google to quick to reply with:
“No. Posting daily or at any specific frequency for that matter doesn’t help with ranking better in Google search results. However, the more pages you have in the Google index, the more your content may show up in search results.”
Getting more and more pages published is certainly not the solution, which is both weird and sensible. This discussion just happens to go back to a different Office-hours Hangout discussion from more than a year ago with John Mueller on why Google doesn’t crawl enough pages of some websites while it does so for others.
Why doesn’t Google crawl enough pages from some websites?
Here’s what John said back then.
“The other big reason why we don’t crawl a lot from websites is because we’re not convinced about the quality overall. So that’s something where, especially with newer sites, I see us sometimes struggle with that. And I also see sometimes people saying well, it’s technically possible to create a website with a million pages because we have a database and we just put it online.
And just by doing that, essentially from one day to the next we’ll find a lot of these pages but we’ll be like, we’re not sure about the quality of these pages yet. And we’ll be a bit more cautious about crawling and indexing them until we’re sure that the quality is actually good.”
It makes sense not to have too many pages being published if the websites lacks overall quality that Google deems to be of a certain quality standards. It is important to note that if you are into publishing news and events then publishing daily should be norm regardless of whether or not Google is going to index those pages.
How to get more pages indexed by Google?
The advice comes from John Mueller, as usual, from yet another Office-hours discussion dating back to May 14, 2021. His first suggestion was to ensure that the crawling wasn’t being hindered because of some technical reason, for example 500 errors. His second suggestion was to promote on social pages the pages that aren’t being indexed. He said, and we quote.
“And if it’s well crawlable then the next thing I would consider trying to figure out is what you can do to promote your website a little bit better. So that when our systems look at your website, they say, oh this is actually a legitimate small business.
We should try to index everything. Because especially if you’re talking about a smaller website with a couple hundred pages, that feels like something where if we have a little bit of a hint then we’ll go off and get all of that. If you’re talking about an e-commerce site that has 500,000 pages then obviously (like) if we get all of those pages or not, that’s a totally different story.”
Internal Linking Structure and Quality, not Quantity is the key.
The last thing he stated to be of extreme importance when it comes to crawling and indexing is the website’s internal linking structure. It is something that helps Google determine which pages of the website are most important. That and obviously the importance of giving quality a preference over quantity.
“The other thing is internal linking is very important for us to understand what you would consider to be important on a website. So things, for example, that are linked from the home page are usually a sign that you care about these pages, so maybe we should care about them more.”
“On the one hand, kind of making sure that it’s easy for us to recognize the important content on a website is really good. Which sometimes means making less content and making better content. So having fewer pages that you want to have indexed.” Concluded John.
You can hear Google’s full response to question at the 06:47 minute mark and may be also stick around for the rest of the discussion for some other valuable insights.
Source: Search Engine Journal
