How often do you update your website?

[GarethShaw]

@HazelC - I am glad that you enjoyed the irony

 

[Hunnie]

Hello,
I have 3 websites. All are free ones and very simple.
Our customer base is varied but not sophisticated. Many have commented on how easy it is to find information on our websites so I am happy to stay with them.
Personally I hate it when a site starts to carousel pictures or play music at me.
I don't usually want to be entertained- just to find answers.
I do, however check through our websites weekly and update information if required. Sooner if I know changes have occurred.
regards
Hunnie

 

[GDC71]

Its a good topic this - lots of interesting opinions!

I don't have a website; the majority of what I do is word of mouth, talking to people and referrals. If I did have a website I would imagine it wouldn't need much updating once it was created - what I do doesn't change much, my services are the same now as they have been for years. So a bit like a solicitors or dentists website - in those cases I would expect their website to work like a business card - here we are, this is what we do and this is how to contact us.

Now if it was a retail business that only, or mainly, did business online then I would expect that to be updated almost daily - latest products, reviews on products and so on.

As for a full website redesign - surely the website would be branded to match your corporate image so a redesign would only happen if you ever rebranded your whole business surely?

 

[davehayes]

Thanks Dave - if you ever need me in the future please don't hesitate to contact me, as a smaller company I have few overheads and therefore am of a lower price than the competition

I see you have had a lot of responses to your query - everyone has different points of views and that's why forums are so great!

Thanks Hazel

 

[Ashley_Price]

Just came across this WEBSITE which appears to have last been updated in 1999 (and certainly looks like it). All the information is on the home page and the menu options just take you to the relevant place on that page.

 

[fisicx]

Updating isn't always a good thing: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/

PS: you will get sucked into looking at a lot of really bad sites. Some of them are jawdroppingly awful.

 

[RichardDee]

I try to post on my blog weekly. I have been looking around for different kinds of content to put on there besides blogs, but haven't found much else relevant to my industry (security services). I think having a live Twitter feed on there is a great way to make the site look current. I find that, particularly with Yorkshire based small companies, Twitter is the best way of networking and finding out the latest news. I'm in Leeds and there's a huge Leeds Twitter community. I'm only just getting around to branching out into the rest of the county!

 

[NickGrogan]

Complete Site Design: 2-3 years or longer
Minor changes: Annually (made scalable for ipad/desktop/phone recently)
Major New content: Quarterly to bi-annually, as needed
Price Graphs: every day or two.
News posts: every 4 hours

 

[RichardDee]

News posts: every 4 hours

Just out of interest, what kind of thing do you publish every four hours?

 

[NickGrogan]

We get news feeds from energy suppliers, Ofgem, DECC. 30 news items per day is not unusual.

 

[RichardDee]

Doesn't duplicate content go against you from an SEO perspective?

 

[NickGrogan]

Very little duplication, suppliers tend not to talk about each other, and I do manage some posts. traffic is up 300% so far this year, biggest change is the news feed - before I would publish something every week or 2, sometimes more, sometimes less. Google webmasters shows 95% of pages submitted are listed and analytics seems happy too.

 

[RichardDee]

No, I meant more that the content on your site is exactly the same as content elsewhere on the web. I read that Google puts you down rankings for that, but I guess if your figures are as they are, this might not be the case?

 

[fisicx]

NIck, Do some testing, turn off the news feed things and see if it makes any difference. It's not traffic that matters; only conversions. If those visitors are looking at the news feeds and bouncing off then they aren't much use to you.

Richard, Google won't push your ranking down, it will just ignore the duplicate content. On trhe other hand if all you do is regurgitate a mass of news feeds then google may take exception and depress the wehole site (because it's not adding value).

The clever blogger links to the news feed, extract snippets and then adds their own comments/views/perspective. Or you do what I do and don't bother at all and just focus on the activitres that bring in new business.

 

[NickGrogan]

Analytics shows that most of the new traffic is coming into the news pages, but also allows me to track where they go after that. A good portion read a post or 2 and disappear again, but enough take a look at other pages as well.

I agree that it's not just about traffic, I have created what I consider to be high traffic sites before (300,000 uniques daily), but at this level traffic is cheap, from a hosting point of view, so if I get a few 1000 hits that bring nothing it's not a problem as long as there are 1 or 2 good enquiries mixed in.

 

[HazelC]

NIck, Do some testing, turn off the news feed things and see if it makes any difference. It's not traffic that matters; only conversions. If those visitors are looking at the news feeds and bouncing off then they aren't much use to you.

Richard, Google won't push your ranking down, it will just ignore the duplicate content. On trhe other hand if all you do is regurgitate a mass of news feeds then google may take exception and depress the wehole site (because it's not adding value).

.

I disagree - I have seen sites penalised for duplicate content so I would agree with Richard on this one.

 

[RichardDee]

I disagree - I have seen sites penalised for duplicate content so I would agree with Richard on this one.

Thanks Hazel. I've been doing a lot of research and reading up on this of late and it seemed (to me at least) that duplicate content is now a punishable offence in Google's eyes. If companies are 're-purposing' blogs then that must be for this very same reason. Last par here is pretty useful w/r to content: http://crowdbait.co.uk/news/content-vlogs-repurposing-amazons-secrets-revealed-1956/

 

[Paul Norman]

As a big ecommerce operation, we are updating every day - different staff have different responsibilities in this respect. Stock gets updated whenever we have a drop, the blog and news bits are updated about 3 times a week, offers and pricing is reviewed daily.

 

[fisicx]

...it seemed (to me at least) that duplicate content is now a punishable offence in Google's eyes.

Google will not punish your site for publishing content found elsewhere. All google will do is ignore the content.

What google will punish is regurgitated, spun and marketed content published to try and boost ranking. But that's nothing new. Google has always done this. What has changed is the targeting of this low quality content by Google.

If google was going to punish duplicate content half the news sites in the world would has perished years ago.

 

[RichardDee]

If google was going to punish duplicate content half the news sites in the world would has perished years ago.

Well as Google keeps changing, surely its 'rules' do, too - which would change the way it values posts from year to year?

 

[RichardDee]

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value." - This is what I was referring to.

 

[NickGrogan]

Matt Cutts at Google says that 25-30% of the internet is duplicate content and you won't necessarily be penalised for it, but also it won't always help you.

http://searchengineland.com/googles...ontent-is-duplicate-content-thats-okay-180063

We work with energy suppliers like British Gas, Npower, etc. If they do something like raise / lower prices or Cameron makes a speech about them, it will go out on the services like newswire, appear in every national and many regional newspapers, news channels and so on. Huge amounts of duplicate content.

If we ignore it then people visiting our site won't find the information they need, and will have to go elsewhere - if we tried to created our own original content from the original story it would still be duplicate content - how many ways can you say "prices up 5%" ? we'd also need at least one full time writer.

Therefore, we link to authoritative sources with extracts, whilst providing clients with additional information about the industry.

I will be checking content more often to make sure the least relevant content is dropped.