I figured out recently that Google does factor in how active your site or blog is when ranking content in the search results. In the SEO world, there’s a ton of recommendations on keyword research and how to write the perfect articles. However, what no body talks about is whether a blog or website being active in publishing new content has an affect on the traffic that will be sent to it by Google through organic searches. I found out recently with my https://Build5Nines.com website that Google does take into account how active your website is in how it will rank that websites content in search.

Below is a snapshot from the Google Search Console for the website. You can see that the traffic from Google search was declining steadily, and when I started publishing new content and curating old content, Google immediately started increasing the search rankings and traffic coming to the site from Google searches.

Google Search Console showing search ranking/traffic increasing

Back in 2020, https://Build5Nines.com reached a monthly page view count of about 130K. Then I has some personal stuff happen that took my focus off of the blog for about 18 months. In that 18 months, the traffic to the blog steadily declined with virtually zero new content being published. The monthly page views declined to about 30K per month in June 2022.

In mid July 2022, I started publishing new content again, as well as curating / updating some of the old content. As a result of the blog becoming active again, Google started ranking my content higher in search and sending more traffic to the site again. It’s almost like Google was like, “Hey this websites not dead anymore, let’s start ranking it again.”

What I’ve learned from first-hand experience is that Google does in fact rank active blogs that publish new content higher in search results than blogs that have old / stale content. This is proof that if you want to build a successful blog, and keep it that way, you’ll need to keep publishing new content on a schedule of some kind.

Below is a snapshot of the overall graph of website traffic for https://Build5Nines.com over time. At the height of things, back in October 2020, the website was up to 130k+ page views, with some months higher as certain content went viral on social shares.

Build5Nines.com traffic over time

You can see that instantly in July 2022, when I started publishing new content again, the traffic started bumping up. And, in August 2022, the traffic was back up to 44k+ page views almost instantly once the website wasn’t “dead” anymore.

If you have an old blog and are looking to blog again, I totally recommend that you start publishing new content on the old blog, instead of starting a brand new site. You’ll be able to take advantage of Google rankings on the existing content, even if you don’t get the traffic you used to anymore.

Happy blogging!