What Really Happens If You Stop Updating Your Blog For Weeks

“The red phone suddenly started ringing. Sergey was astonished and incredulous. It was a long time he didn’t hear that sound and he knew that it wasn’t a good sign. So, he answered the phone quite thrilled:

• “Hallo?”
• “I’m Larry. I didn’t succeed in updating it.”

Those were the words he never wanted to hear.

• “Pardon, can you repeat please? I think I didn’t understand……”
• “You understood properly, Sergey. There’s no new post. It wasn’t updated.”
• “Are you sure about that? Did you run all controls?”
• “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. I know you are puzzled, but that’s the sad truth: he didn’t update the blog”

It was a long time that something so mysterious didn’t happen in Mountain View, and now it was important to take a decision at once:

• “What will we do then?”
• “You well know the procedure in these cases.”
• “Yes, but….maybe he was just too busy or he had an accident….”
• “It’s useless now to search for some excuses: the blog hasn’t been updated and we have to follow the procedure.”
• “OK Larry. Give advice to the Game Over department. Cut all pages, wipe them out from SERP. Close his AdSense account, kidnap his wife, steal his car and………..”

At this moment usually you suddenly wake up, in a cold sweat, while your mind takes its time to get in touch with the reality, and then you understand you were just dreaming, luckily….it was only a bad dream…….

Photo Credit: cybernesco

Come on, who is not victim of this fear? A fear that, with years, has taken place of the past and common nightmare of the missing high school license exam for an alarm-clock that didn’t go off. That’s a true nightmare for any blogger: what happens if I am not regular in updating my blog?

A part from any sort of blogger or information overload mania, what will really happen in case we stop up-dating our site? Which are the risks we run?

Here my personal experience when I stopped updating it for 2 months.

In the last two years, the italian version of Ikaro has been updated on average every week with 3 new articles, up to 23 June, 2007. From that day on up to 3 September 2007 I nearly abandoned it.

Let’s try now, examining all access statistics, if bloggers fears can be real or not.

2006 and 2007 access comparison

From Google Analytics I get all accesses trend referring to the period 23 June 06 – 03 September 2007: it is compared to the same period of time in 2007. We should notice that in 2006, my blog was updated quite regularly, while, in 2007 in was abandoned.

I must specify that it is much better to consider just its trend and not its absolute values, as one year of difference means more articles, more contacts, more links. In other words: more traffic. As much as about the trend, it is easy to find a sort of similarity up to the end of August, and after that period there is in 2007 a sudden and astonishing jump: that is to say after 2 months the blog was abandoned!

But this jump could be the result of off site elements, for example a sudden popularity of an article thanks to a keyword related to a subject ran on tv or on a newspaper. In other words, we still have few data to state that my site didn’t really suffer from 2 not updated months. Therefore, let’s extract the traffic and let’s do the same graphic for:

• Direct access
• Engine access

Direct access traffic comparison

Engine access traffic comparison

It seems to be quite clear that this raise was determined by traffic coming from all search engines, the one that we supposed to be the most suffering from such a long time blog inactivity.

Engine traffic analysis

Why do engines had such a raise in visits after 2 months inactivity? If we are so stubborn to refuse that updating frequently our blog is not that much important, not even a risk of being penalized from engines, we should think as well that the cause of such a raise is maybe an important keyword, which appeared in 2007, but was absent in 2006. But it isn’t so. Top keys are always the same ones, but in 2007 they were much more incisive in all serp. Here you have:

1. coolstreaming   +95%
2. voipstunt           +196%
3. pplive                   +33%
4. tv internet          +905%
5. software free    +100%

Conclusions

My conclusion is a simple one: all blogger mania of updating constantly one’s own web site with thousands of information, sometimes not interesting, is really useless. You can live your life quietly even if you don’t update your site so frequently as you think you should (a part in those cases in which such a frequency is an editorial choice, of course).

I realize that many SEO and marketers will disagree my statements but, on my turn, I disagree such a maniac and empiric way (supported by too many numbers, operations and formulas), stealing web marketing of its nature. Sometimes it is much better to stop calculating, forecasting or thinking to be some sort of scientists, in order to make a stop, relax and observe silently all situations in their developing.