Issue is which day you publish.
You can be concerned but it depends on the nature of website.
You can block comments (robots.txt file) to be seen within search engine if you like.

Hi toplisek,

Not sure I fully understand your responses.

What do you mean "issue is which day you publish?" Does the day matter? I try to publish every Monday, but sometimes it can be a few days before or after.

My site is educational. A lot of information is "timeless," in other words, the info was applicable decades ago and it will be the same into the future.

My question about site visitors leaving Comments was if they count as a published article as far as search engines are concerned. I don't really want to block them.

Thanks again.

We recently had to leave a website alone for about three months, and we saw very little slip in our SERPs. I wouldn't be overly concerned.

My little hobby site goes for months without being touched or updated and still sits at the top of the results on all the major search engines.

Day and hour is very big concern.
If user receives 20 e-mails per day it matters hour.
Some use this in way that they know what users read and than send 10 minutes before this event is delivered.

I try to help as you posted major thing:
My question about site visitors leaving Comments was if they count as a published article as far as search engines are concerned.

So, my reply to this would be as we know now your topic (webisite),verify what is goal at website. We usually do not like some content to be in search engines. If you have negative feedback (comment), you have security concerns, you have to watch what competition will say etc. You see there is your answer on your FAQ as main point is always GOAL of website and SEO.

Thanks for the info. I'm still a bit unclear as to why I should be concerned about the day I publish articles. Does it really matter as long as it's fairly consistent?

As I noticed you do not care about hour. But I just sent you example how to deal wit this if you care about this.

It totally depends on the type of your website. And you can surely have someone in your absence to review your work,and if trust able with skills, he can post articles for you too.

Do others have opinions whether or not it is important to publish regularly every week. Sometimes I can churn out several articles a week (though I schedule them); other times it seems I have nothing to write about.

I've been working on my site for more than five years. Sometimes I just plain feel like taking a couple of months vacation from it. But then I get that voice in the back of my mind saying I need to publish at least one article a week.

I have about seven hundred pages of info at my site. As mentioned, most of the info is valid whether you read it years ago or read it decades into the future.

Frequency of publishing is some consideration, but not overriding. If content is quality but only comes once a month it will do better than low quality content once a week. I have gone as long as a year without updating/adding content to some sites and see no appreciable change in ranking or visitors.

I will not be able to write or actively work on my site for a few months. Should I be concerned?

Not really unless most of your search traffic came in spurts immediately after you published something. Content pages that bring a handful of visitors per day each tend to continue doing so regardless of new content (they tend to stop when they get too deeply buried in an average sites link structure actually).

Also, when people leave comments at a site, does that count with the search engines?

Google does keep track of the number of comments a page might have, as well as the number of replies to a forum post, but I would worry more about giving someone else access to the site than I would be by having comments pile up. Consider turning the new comments option off while you're away so nobody gets frustrated and spam doesn't back up in your database.

So what is a good amount of articles posted weekly? Now I post two or three, I'm wondering if this is too little? But for now I don't have time to write more...

Not really unless most of your search traffic came in spurts immediately after you published something.

No it doesn't. The pages that bring the most traffic has been quite consistent for years.

(they tend to stop when they get too deeply buried in an average sites link structure actually).

What do you mean by this? Get too deeply buried...in the link structure?

Thanks.

Depends on what you are writing about, Shallow. I have three sites, and I am the only who updates them, so at least one of them misses the train to Ypdate Station quite regularly, but it does not make much of a difference once you have a generous amount of content in place.

Every week u should published one article...its will be easier to get max traffic to ur web site. coz no of u gud article placed on google rank automaticaly u will gain points.

Hi shallow,
You know that every Search engine likes blogs because blog publishes fresh content.Fresh content is like the meat for search engine robots.Search engine robots and spiders crawls the blog for indexing the fresh content into search engines.If you publish your blog post more frequently,It means more frequency of Search Engine robots and spiders crawling and more indexing of your content in Search Engines.

If content is quality but only comes once a month it will do better than low quality content once a week.

I strongly agree with Tangor on that comment.

I also agree with those who say that publishing new content less frequently will not hurt the rankings or traffic that existing content gets. That has certainly been my experience.

Publish an article when you have something worthwhile to say, and don't stress about posting something just for the sake of posting something.

I say publish something new every day.

I have sites I've barely touched in years. It depends on how competitive the niche is and other factors. Like if your competitors all have links from blog comments and squidoo and yours are from the BBC and .gov sites, you might never have to touch your site again to keep its rankings.

U can publish article on daily basis and promote through bookmarking and smo..
Within 4 and 5 days the site is cached by search engines...

I'm not going to repeat myself (above), but will extend that thought to observe that when pressure is applied for new content everyday, unless one is doing a "news site", the content invariably begins to suffer. I am a writer. I write for my sites and others as well. I write on many subjects. I also end up with brain pharts when pressured to produce as little as 150 words a day EVERYDAY, WEEK ON WEEK, YEAR ON YEAR for limited niche subjects... in most cases I can't make it for an entire year (unless I'm just cranking out product descriptions)

There is a myth that new content will keep you in the search engines. I say that is a myth because once your page(s) have been indexed JUST TRY TO GET THEM REMOVED from a search engine! All of them, in my experience NEVER FORGET and keep trying to revisit pages I removed as far back as ten years! (even with 404s and 301s!).

New content does NOT keep your site indexed. In most cases new content doesn't really increase site index frequency. And, when you finally get a body of work on the web, several thousand(s) pages, there will come a time you'll want that frequency to back off so your pipe remains open for VISITORS.

When you start a blog you need to keep one thing in mind "update the blog with fresh content very frequently or else its search engine ranking (value) will come down".

If you have started doing blog post twice a week then you have to maintain the same pace, like if you are doing the blog posts on Monday and Friday keep posting the blog posts on same days of every week. Since, once the search engine would have found-out that you have been doing blog posts on particular days, it starts crawling the blog on those days only for fresh content and to maintain this consistency with search engine crawlers, you need to maintain this time frame.

I have experienced this myself by maintaining a blog of mine for few months and I was able to increase the blog's Google PR for 0 to 4 in 3-months of duration and it also started ranking in first page of Google search by this time.

Never take a break in between when you start a blog, it may drop your blog's ranking or value in search engines.

Accepting comments with links helps your blog to become popular among the blogger community only if its a genuine comment. Each comment will not by genuine and there also exists spam comments which need to be rejected and deleted before getting accepted. So, you need check it out before approving it.

<snip>

[edited by: engine at 9:21 am (utc) on Jun 22, 2010]
[edit reason] No self promo, thanks [/edit]