: Does updating site too frequently hurt SEO rankings? I recently updated my site, like 3-4 times in 2 months. At first everything was good, (i.e., Google was updating my pages' SERP content in

@Si4351233

No, Updating website too frequently will not hurt your SEO.

Keyword in title is not more meaningful. As title is second most important on–page SEO element. I will suggest you to read below guideline for creating unique title.
moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
According to Webmaster Guidelines, crawling & indexing of the page is depends on If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Is it bad to update too frequently?

No, There are lots of website on the internet, which are getting updates in time seconds like amazon.com.

Updating a website can be a good thing for you, If you follow basic rules of Webmaster guidelines. Google always like New and fresh updates of the website.

If your website will down when Google is going to crawl, then Google is re-scheduling the Crawl of the Website after 24 hours. If the downtime is more than 24 hours or repeating more time then It will definitely hurt your Website SERP.

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@Cugini213

Updating very frequently is always a good thing and your site get crawled frequently but updation should be done in content not with URL and title. If title is not working for your site then you can change it but not to frequently.

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@Samaraweera270

Also, my site is hosted on a free host called 000Webhost, so it is sometimes down. Could that affect ranking very much? ...I don't think Google visits my site very often, and Google Webmaster Tools says so too.


This is a pretty significant issue, which you indicated before here as well. If Google can't reach your site, it's not going to be able to index changes to it and might slow down crawling it. You really should consider moving your site to a more reliable web host.


Is it bad to update too frequently?


Generally, updating content frequently will result in your website getting crawled more frequently, so it's definitely not a bad thing to do.


My URLs are nearly the same as before...


If your URLs change, you'll need to 301 redirect them to ones with matching content, and get the new URLs indexed by submitting them in a sitemap.


My page titles and meta descriptions changed in terms of order. They were starting with brand name, and now they are starting with keywords.


That's not necessarily a bad thing either, providing that you're not repeating keywords (i.e., keyword stuffing).


My site also has no backlinks whatsoever


Obtaining some backlinks from authoritative relevant sites would certainly help, but the site needs to be reachable on a consistent basis too.


Do you think my site is Sandboxed?


It's likely not experiencing a Sandbox effect based on what you've described - it probably just hasn't been crawlable, relearned, and updated. I would suggest first fixing your web hosting, doing appropriate 301 redirection, resubmitting new URLs in your sitemap, and finally working on getting some quality backlinks.

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@Fox8124981

Updating pages can be a problem or a solution.


Small changes are usually not a problem, but think about this: if you change a page that displays content about "football" and now displays content about "monkeys", as an example, of course rankings are gonna drop, you're completely changing the subject of a page.

If that's not the case, and you're simply updating pages with different but related content, make sure you're doing it for the better. Better content, better structured urls etc.

Also, if urls are gonna change, make sure you properly forward them with 301 redirects.

Your hosting being down is not gonna be helpful. But it also depends on how often. Many companies offer about 99% up time, so right there you do know it is not always up. But down time is definitely gonna hurt you.

What else you can do:


Make sure google sees the changes in your pages. For this,

1 - On Webmaster Tools, Go to "Health" / "Fetch as Google" where you can enter the address of the page that has changed, click on "Fetch" then click on "Submit to index". At which point a message will pop up and say: "Select if your page is new or has been recently updated. Google doesn't guarantee to index all submitted URLs." Choose your option, and hit OK.

2 - Resubmit sitemap.

3 - Adjust crawl frequency.

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