Google conducted an SEO office hours hangout in which someone asked if adding content on a regular basis was helpful for ranking.

It’s a good question because it’s commonly understood that publishing content on a regular basis is a good idea because it keeps readers coming back for more.

Publishing Daily Good For Rankings?

This is the question that was asked:

“Does posting one content daily increase ranking?”

It’s unclear who at Google answered the question.

This is the answer that was given from Google:

“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.”

Get Into the Google Index

It’s been noted over the past few years that Google does not crawl all content.

And if the content isn’t crawled then it’s not going to be indexed, which is important for ranking.

Part of the reason why Google might not crawl that content is the overall quality of a website.

Google’s John Mueller said:

“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.”

Google Encourages Awesomeness

Googlers have stopped recommending that publishers focus on producing “awesome” content.

But it’s still a useful (if vague) recommendation.

Awesomeness.
Lots of awesomeness.
All kinds of awesomeness.
And add more awesomeness.

— 🌽〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉🌽 (@JohnMu) November 8, 2021

What is awesomeness?

One characteristic of awesomeness is how enthusiastically readers engage with content.

And what causes them to do that is more than just being awesome but rather it’s more like being there for the reader by understanding what it is they really want.

In terms of growing the readership of a site it’s certainly helpful to add content on topics that matters to readers.

I’ve noticed that readers can become obsessed with discovering new content when they are very engaged with a topic.

For sites that I publish I’ve had enthusiastic readers as far as the Middle East and Asia write to me about my content and even share photos of their successes.

In my opinion, content can be like eating popcorn when the reader has a strong engagement with the topic – they can’t stop reading it and keep coming back for more.

There’s a reason why there’s so much content written about Star Wars media and Marvel movies.

People who are engaged with a topic will tend to click through when they see an article on that topic in the search results, Google News or Google Discover.

After I started writing for Search Engine Journal I gained a deeper understanding of how important it is to identify what kinds of content is important to readers (as indicated by how many readers engaged with the articles and recommended them).

So it’s not always about constantly publishing content but more, in my experience, about identifying what matters to readers.

That means branching out every once in awhile to see if readers are interested in new topics by testing out some new topics.

Sometimes readers don’t engage with the new topics.

But once in awhile a new topic becomes a hit and that’s when you add that topic to your list of the kinds of articles to write.

A report published by the New York Times in 2021 noted that over 5 million subscriptions are for their news product but interestingly over 1.6 million readers are subscribed to the New York Times for non-news digital content like cooking and games.

This is the observation that was related in the 2021 New York Times article about their earnings:

“The Times’s primary digital offering, its news product, gained 1.7 million subscribers, a 48 percent increase over 2019.

More than five million Times subscriptions are for the news product alone, The Times said. Other digital offerings, like the Cooking and Games apps, gained more than 600,000 subscriptions in 2020, a 66 percent rise, for a total of roughly 1.6 million.”

Who would have known that a significant number of New York Times readers would be highly engaged with recipe content more than the core news content?

Ranking in Google or just building a readership is more than just writing keyword optimized content.

Identifying the topics that are important to readers is critical.

Citation

Listen to the short Webmaster Hangout at the 6:47 minute mark

English Google SEO office-hours from September 2022

Featured image by Shutterstock/Khosro