Updating your pages frequently is one way of encouraging regular visits by search engine spiders, and News sites and blogs, where the content of the site changes on a regular basis, can expect more frequent crawling. However simple updates it’s insiginificant in terms of your ranking compared to the effect quality inbound links will have.
The point is not to get Google to crawl your site as often as possible, but to build links to your pages that tell Google your pages are important enough to keep in the main index (and out of the supplemental index). From that perspective, regularly updating your pages is not a critical ranking factor. Automatically streaming RSS feeds onto your pages in order to make Google think your pages are being updated is mostly useless in terms of getting regularly indexed.
The Rise of Deeplinks
So how do you keep Google coming back and indexing your pages on a regular basis? Simple: You need links to those pages. Getting links to your homepage is not enough. If you want your pages to stay in Google’s main index, you’ll need some quality links pointing directly at those pages.
You don’t need an external link pointing at every page on your site, but making sure your most important pages get some links of their own is a very good idea.
And forget about link popularity. These days, getting lots of little links through traditional methods (reciprocal link swapping, submitting to large numbers of directories) is mostly just a ticket to the Google Sandbox for new sites and a waste of time for older sites.
The key to ranking in Google is not link quantity, but link quality. A small number of legitimate, high-quality links can have an amazingly positive effect on a page’s rankings. And the most effective links are built by creating viral content and networking with other related businesses.
A less labor-intensive approach to link building is to go after some free authoritative links. What’s important is that you determine which pages on your site are bringing in the most money and point quality links at those pages so you don’t lose them to the supplemental index.
If your money pages aren’t link-worthy (if they’re just product listings, for example) and you’re having trouble getting links to them, then create some valuable content on your site that can build links. Once those content pages have built up some strong incoming links of their own, then link them to your money pages.
And when implementing your link-building campaign don’t just focus on links to your home page, but make sure that you also get some deep links to other key pages in your site.