Can inactivity cause ranking drop

[Milo]

Hi all,
I have been doing quite well for my search term "wedding invitations" in Google.com.au for quite a few years now. However, I recently left my website (in signature) without updates for 5 weeks over December and a bit of January. I did continue to process orders and answer emails, but did no actual page updates and information was not added to the site during this time. I continually checked my rankings though December and all was going well (I was ranking #4 for this term) until the first week of January. From 3 January I slipped to the second page to #11, the first time in many years we have disappeared from page 1. Initially I thought it was temporary, but now I'm still sitting there and google has done 2 cache updates of my site since then. I have also been doing my usual homepage updates when adding new products to our catalogue since 7 January, so there is actuivity again.

O.K. my question is, can not adding or changing a website for 5 weeks cause a drop in ranking so drastic? If so, has anyone had any experience like this and did your ranking get back or close to where it was before (and how long did it take to re-appear).

Thanks in advance.

[watto]

Hi,

I have also experienced a drop in page rank (google.com.au) for my main search term 'business for sale'. I have been in the #4 position for over 12 months, sometimes getting to number 3, but for the last week or so I have been doing the google dance and dropping to as low as number 8 or 9.

I was also on page 1 in google.com for the same term, but dropped a full page and I am now on the bottom of page 2.

I seriously don't think it is because there has been no updates of your site over the past 5 weeks, but maybe google is updating its algorithm.

My advice is to not panick and don't change anything on your site. You will more than likely go back to the same position you were.

Cheers

watto

[watto]

I just checked and can see you are back on page 1. I have experienced similar fluxuations in the past, and without changing anything on my page, I always ended up back in the same position.

Cheers

watto

[cw1865]

You definitely want to keep the content fresh. From my experience, the fresher my sites, the more spider activity; which seems to help me out a lot.

[wige]

I also think lately Google has been giving a bump to fresh content. If this bump is what has been keeping your site on the front page, and Googlebot has gotten used to seeing new content being added regularly, changes in that schedule could cause you to lose positions - especially if you lose the freshness bump. I see this mentioned more in relation to newer sites, but I think it can be an important factor on established sites as well. I also suspect that this may help the overall site more than the individual pages (possibly following the internal link structure) so that Google can highlight pages that are frequently changing and may be of more benefit to searchers.

[erikko]

not really because there is a case where one blog still got a PR 4 eventhough it has not been updated nor promoted for months, i assume that the blog got deep links and enough links for the PR to be maintained

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by erikko

not really because there is a case where one blog still got a PR 4 eventhough it has not been updated nor promoted for months, i assume that the blog got deep links and enough links for the PR to be maintained

Not really what, erikko? If you don't quote what you are responding to, it's confusing.

Fresh content has nothing to do with PR; it is only to do with links, both internal and incoming. And while Google does respond very well to sites with updated content, if the older content is original and unique, there is no reason the site can't outrank sites with fresher content. But I would always advise adding more content.

[Milo]

Thanks for the feedback guys, greatly appreciated. Seems that fresh content does help. My concern is also not with PR but generic rank. Hopefully everything retunrs back to normal as I'm back after the holidays and our site add new content and products daily and this is notified on the homepage. I'll definately keep a watch on this.
Cheers.

[HarveyP]

Due to circumstancesx beyond my control I was unable to edit my site for most of 2007. My ranking actually improved - I checked before making some edits earlier this week.

[full house]

I also experience a huge drop in google.com this past few days but on the month of December it was doing good and some keywords landing on the first page on google.com.

I guess its because of the google dance and the update. . . my blog drop from PR 3 to 0.

[bobchrist]

Obviously inactivity cause ranking drop that is the reason on-going search engine optimization is often recommended.

[erikko]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

Not really what, erikko? If you don't quote what you are responding to, it's confusing.

Fresh content has nothing to do with PR; it is only to do with links, both internal and incoming. And while Google does respond very well to sites with updated content, if the older content is original and unique, there is no reason the site can't outrank sites with fresher content. But I would always advise adding more content.

i mean that in the case of my friend's blog there's not that much fresh content and yet the blog got a PR 4 plus good rankings in SERP's sorry for the confussion i brought you

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by bobchrist

Obviously inactivity cause ranking drop that is the reason on-going search engine optimization is often recommended.

Huh why do you feel this is the case? Website rank fine for many years without changing content because people keep link to it.

[Milo]

Originally Posted by bobchrist

Obviously inactivity cause ranking drop that is the reason on-going search engine optimization is often recommended.

Thanks bobchrist, but there was a little more to this post than just the title.

[simonbuxton132]

I am now nervous of changing content as my recent effort in making the product descriptions more spider friendly caused Google to drop 80 pages from the index - it seems that a link a day is now coming back.

[Webnauts]

As mentioned above, fresh content is only useful to get crawled more frequently. If your site does not require any changes, it is not necessary at all.

If this was not a fact, search engines would not require the use of If-Not-Modified HTTP conditionals.