One SEO professional asked John in a hangout about publishing consistency.
They explained that they have a blog where they post one article per day.
Another person has a blog and they are publishing one article per week. So their own consistency is higher.
They were wondering if this publishing consistency will somehow affect their ranking on Google and the frequency at which Google crawls their website.
They offered the following hypothetical situation: say they publish the same content on the same day, however, the other colleague publishes less content on their blog.
Will the first SEO professional’s site rank higher, with the other colleague’s site ranking on the bottom, or does consistency have any connection with ranking?
John explained that publishing consistency is not a ranking factor, but many other factors go into ranking.
Google needs to be able to crawl and index a site.
This happens at approximately the 3:14 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
So my question is that we all have heard of a term called crawl budget. And suppose I have a blog in which I post almost one article every day.
Another person has a blog, in which he posts about one article a week. So according to consistency, I am a bit more consistent than him. So will it affect how Google will frequently–will it affect the frequency on how Google will crawl my website?
Or how Google will handle my website? Suppose we both publish the same content on the same day, but he publishes less content in his blog.
So will my content rank in Google on top, and his content will rank on Google on down or low? Does consistency have any connection with ranking?
John 4:32
I don’t think so. So there are a lot of factors that go into ranking. And being able to crawl and index a website is definitely one of those things. But if we’re talking about one, one page per day, or one page a week, kind of the ability for us to crawl that is trivial.
If we’re talking about millions of pages every day, then, like sometimes the technical capabilities kind of come into play.
And crawl budget is a topic. But if we’re talking about, I don’t know, a couple of pages a day, or 1,000 pages a day or even 10,000s of pages a day, then that’s something that we can usually crawl in a reasonable time anyway.
So that’s less a matter of being able to crawl it on time and more a matter of all of the other factors that we use around search.