Manipulate Your Blog Post Timings for Maximum Impact

I read a blog post yesterday which I glossed over, forgot about and then regurgitated today. I would like to link to it but I cannot find it now so apologies to the author. The key point that I extracted from this blog posting was that sticking to a daily posting frequency was a bad idea, which is somewhat controversial advice.

Isn’t Daily Posting the “Golden Rule #1″?

I had been planning to launch this blog for some weeks before I actually did so and over the last few months I have become an avid reader of over a dozen blogs that are just about blogging! One piece of advice that I read over and over again, is to establish a posting schedule, ideally daily, and stick to it. As I’ll be doing this full time in a few days I have no excuse not to blog daily (technical difficulties aside!)

Consider the GoogleBot

The post that I read yesterday made a very interesting argument against it: Google crawls sites on a regular basis looking for new content to index. Generally speaking, the very popular sites will get indexed very frequently but newer, unranked sites such as this blog do not get indexed as often.

When Google comes to your site it usually comes in at the index page unless it has followed an external link that linked into a page deep in your site. It will then start indexing and crawing the home page from top to bottom. For a blog there is usually a fixed number of posts that appear on the home page, and then old ones drop off into the archives in order to make room for new posts.

The post went on to make the very good point that if you post “filler content” just to keep up your daily schedule, that you may be knocking good content off your homepage before it has been indexed by Google just so that you can stick to your arbitrary schedule. That’s a very good point, and one that I hadn’t thought of before. Thankfully, I haven’t felt the need to post filler content yet, but the concept raised a different concern for me.

Keeping the Best Content on Top

There are occasions when I might want to publish smaller, less important posts in addition to the regular content that I had planned for that day. A perfect example would be the post before this one regarding my lack of broadband connection.

Blogs always have the latest post at the top of the page which means that your latest post will be the first thing that the Google bot sees, and the first thing that any site visitors see. My post about my broadband connection is important for my existing readers because I want to let them know that I’m not slacking off, but it offers nothing of value to new visitors and of course offers nothing to the GoogleBot either - I’m not trying to rank for any keywords in that post.

My solution to this is to not publish the less important post right away but to wait until I am ready to post my main content for that day and publish it immediately beforehand. This way both posts are published, any RSS readers get the full benefit from both posts, new visitors see the best content first and Google see’s the most important content first. Everyone is happy :-)

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