I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
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