If you were to ask any company owner or marketer “Is it important to make sure the content on your web site is up to date?” you know they’d answer “Yes.” But if you follow up and ask them what review/update policy or schedule is, you’re likely to get a blank stare in response.
It’s clearly important that you have up to date info available for potential customers, partners and/or the media depending on your business model. If you want your site to be found in Google (and other Search Engines) when people search for your goods or services, it’s more important than ever.
There’s a new phenomenon of disappearing indexed pages out there, and it’s not an X-file, it’s Google re-examining your content and choosing to ignore pages with poor or little content.
Gary Illyes from Google puts it this way when he’s replying to a webmaster’s query about why his indexed pages are dropping even though the sitemap he submits to Google contains all his current pages:
As we improve our algorithms, they may decide to not reindex pages that are likely to be not useful for the users. I took a look on the pages that were once indexed but currently aren’t and it appears there are quite a few that have no real content.
Here’s a link to more about this topic and the source of the quote at SEORoundTable: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-algorithms-index-16210.html
You really can’t ignore content review on your site anymore, now’s the time to create a quarterly or monthly schedule to review your web page content, make updates, and beef up pages that are light or fluffy. While you’re at it – consider doing some SEO work to improve each page’s organic ranking while you’re focused on it.
If you can’t find time in your schedule or the skills on your team to commit to keeping your site current, we’re here to help you out.
