Source : Blogstorm.co.uk

The phrase “search engines love fresh content” is used hundreds of times every week by people answering beginners questions on SEO forums. Can you really get higher rankings just by adding new content to your static site?

I’ve always hated the phrase “fresh content” because it adds to the misinformation that people who claim to be “SEO’s” use when trying to educate other webmasters about SEO. Visit the popular forums and the four main pieces of advice handed out are “content is king”, “submit your site to directories”, “exchange links with relevant sites” and “add fresh content”. Thanks to this advice the web is full of sites that syndicate duplicate content from article directories just for the sake of publishing something “fresh”.

Ironically this low quality content is probably doing more harm than good.

Crawl Rate
Websites with content that changes frequently (such as news sites & blogs) often see increased spider activity as Google tries to make sure all the latest stories are indexed quickly. One of the factors Google uses to determine the best rate to crawl a website is the frequency the content on the site is changed. As a general rule if you alter the content on your site more often you should see Googlebot visiting on a more regular basis.

In a patent dating back to 2003 (granted in December 2007) Google entitled Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system (analysis) Google explains how they could place urls in a series of crawl layers to determine how often the page needed to be crawled. For example news.bbc.co.uk would be in the “real time” crawl layer to be crawled almost continually whereas an average blog homepage might be in the “daily” crawl layer to be visited once per day.

The crawl layers could be altered daily by computing a score based on the documents PageRank and frequency of change. Pages with an abnormally high or low daily score might then be moved up or down a crawl layer.

daily score=[page rank].sup.2*URL change frequency

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Blog clean up must be done once in a while. Some parts of your blog tend to be used over and over again. Your blog might need to pay a visit to pump in fresh air to these places. These places won’t annoy your readers at large but you might lose some of your readers who entered your blog via other points rather than your main entrance.

Another reason for a clean up is to boost server loads. Every time your page loads, it might be slowed down by some “behind the scenes” elements which I will show you in this list as well.

10 Important Clean Up Sections For a Blog

Plugins
When we stop using a plugin or a plugin seems to be bugging our blog, we tend to deactivate it. Considering the fact that we might need to use the plugin in the future, we did not delete it from our FTP folders.

Plugins section in the admin panel will tend to have a reminder column under a plugin if we did not update the plugin to its latest version. Deactivated plugins tend to have such reminders as well if they are not updated, making the list long and messy.

Categories
Long categories definitely is not a good thing if you are blogging on a niche blog. Also, targeted traffic might be chased away when at one glance you offer something out of their expectation (unrelated contents). Cleaning up your list of categories will mean regrouping your posts, changing the names of the categories and deleting of categories.

Before you go ahead and modify your categories, be sure that search engines have not indexed your categories pages. You can do this by adding meta tags to stop indexing of such pages, editing the robot.txt file in your server or simply check the box “noindex for Categories” on the All-In-One SEO plugin (if you don’t have it on your blog, get it now!) options page.

Old Post
Posts in your archives might have covered historical events and you might want to link forward to later posts, update the information, correct minor but once undiscovered spelling and grammatical mistakes, recycle and make it your posts for another round or even delete it. Old posts have their own value and they might be the materials that assure new readers that your writings are worth subscribing or coming back.

One thing about revisiting old posts and updating them is that you will pick up some inspiration of what to blog along the way. Resuscitating your old posts by putting in on the front page again can reduce the workload on content creation and capturing new readers with these old but useful posts is an effective method.

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