Okay, this particular myth is somewhat complicated. Jill Whalen, writing for Search Engine Land, revealed an eye-opening insight on this. Many site owners and SEOs think they need to update their sites frequently to score high in the SERPs. In fact, “Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl rate, but it won’t increase your rankings.” In other words, you need to have quality to begin with; adding lots of content just to keep your site fresh won’t necessarily give you a better position in the SERPs. Whalen notes that “some of the highest ranking sites in Google haven’t been touched in years.”
So you don’t need to update your site to keep your rankings in Google, right? Wrong. You still need to engage in some routine maintenance, for the sake of both the search engines and your visitors. There are few things more annoying than trying to follow broken links or reading outdated material on a site that looked as if it would be useful from its Google listing. Also, updating your site encourages the search engine bots to come back and crawl it regularly.
While we’re on the subject of updating, do you need a sitemap and a robots.txt file? I’ve seen conflicting statements about this. The first thing that the search engine spiders look for is a robots.txt file, so having one and keeping it up to date is probably a good idea. Once the bots get the information from the robots.txt file as to where they’re allowed to go, they will check your sitemap and follow every link on it. On the other hand, these two items are not obligatory; as Jill Whalen explains, “If your site was built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a Google Sitemap.” But it couldn’t hurt.
I’ve covered some of the most popular SEO myths in this article. There are plenty more where these came from. Whether you’re hiring an SEO or furthering your own SEO education, I hope I’ve convinced you to approach what you hear in this field with an appropriate sense of skepticism.
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