Do I have to update my website often to be well ranked?
What signals are sent to search engines when a website is frequently updated? On the contrary, what about a frozen content?
There is certainly no positive or negative generic conclusion to these two questions.
For example, does a website providing contents about the conjugation of French verbs, the history of the First World War or even the translation of words into several languages need to be frequently updated?
This is not the same problem as for a news website.
Some answers to questions seem to be totally unchangeable and therefore definitively valid: "When did General de Gaulle die?"
Search engines seem to have processed this question starting from the surfers search by asking themselves the following questions:
Is this search about the current events?
Is the user looking for recent informations?
In this way, a search with the expression "Roland Garros" may or may not concern the current events of the tennis tournament which only takes place over 2 weeks each year, and it can also be about the history of tennis, its evolution, its practices, its famous names...
In the same way, this same search can be based on the biography of the eponymous aviator.
A website then needs to be frequently updated in order to rank on results related to current news. This logic is undeniable.
The major impact of a regularly updated website acts on the higher frequency of robots visits, which doesn't directly impact the ranking of pages.
We will get back to this but a site frequently visited by search engines is not necessarily deeply or completely visited by them. It depends on various factors, sometimes really minor ones (loading time).
