People have often questioned what the affect of irregular updates on a site have on their traffic ranking. Blogs have been introduced to many websites in order to help keep them “fresh” and make sure that search engines come back often. This has a direct impact on advertising earnings as well as visitor loyalty.

We’ve been pretty inactive on this blog over the last couple of weeks and we’ve noticed a decrease in our stats across the board. A stats package such as Google Analytics can help track these trends and here’s some proof to the topic.

The first thing most people look at when tracking stats is pure traffic; how many visits did the site have over a period. This can often be a misleading statistic depending on the purpose of your blog. Do you want many people coming and not doing anything else but reading what they found on Google, or would you prefer a few less people but they are an active part of your site commenting on posts and starting conversations which in turn increase the user experience of your site?

Let’s have a look at the visits on this blog over 2 separate time periods.

The last time period of consistent updates on this site was from 01/2009 until 04/2009

01/2009 – 04/2009

These stats show a pretty consistent amount of traffic over the period with it having the usual of trend of spike dip spike where the first spike becomes your new average after the 2nd spike (we’ve noticed this trend across a number of our sites).

Now we look at the period 04/2009 – 05/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

The images speak for themselves.

Next we look at “visitor loyalty”. When it comes to blogging, visitors are more likely to come back to a blog that is regularly updated than a blog that seems to be dead and forgotten. This is a harsh rule and can apply rapidly. For example; if you have been running a blog for 2 months and have managed to make at least 1 original post per day, people start to see this and will come back every day to read what you have to say. But then, you go on a long weekend holiday and don’t have an update for a couple of days. Next thing you know your stats are showing a decrease in return visits and less traffic from search engines etc. The word “loyalty” in blogging can be thrown around loosely. To me it doesn’t carry the standard definition of “faithfulness or devotion to a cause or person”, but rather something along the lines of “I’ll keep you around while you’re of use to me”.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

This is the “loyalty” I mentioned before. Returning visits are down and there is a steep decline in the 2nd period’s graph. The other sharp decline can be seen in first time visits. A blog will never build up a base of returning users if users never get to the blog in the first place. Most of the blogs I frequent were found through Google – I was looking for something and came across an answer on a blog and enjoyed the content and as a result I know frequent that blog to see what else is going on. This is probably one of the most common scenarios in building up a returning user base.

Search engines enjoy new content. If a site is regularly updated it is seen as a good source of information and search engines will give it preference over “stale” blogs. Search engines can be just as cruel as visitors and will drop you in the blink of an eye.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

You can see clearly from these graphs that when the blog was being kept up to date with regular posts, the amount of referrals from Google were on the rise. This doesn’t just relate to the new content i.e. the latest posts being the most searched for but also some of the older posts that have been crowed pleaser’s for a while. When your blog becomes less attractive to Google even your most popular posts will start drifting off to the 2nd page and even further down on the search engine result pages.

To put it quite simply, no matter how popular your blog is today it can be a baron island that no one can get to in a matter of days if you do not work on it.

Popularity: 6% [?]