Exploiting Longevity For Google Search Results

Here’s an interesting observation I just made to justify how I am writing to the web: Google rewards longevity, and doesn’t care so much about readability. A few months ago I did a revamp on There Is NO Box, and I am continually amazed at the traffic I get for years-old posts which are (frankly) not very good. Some of these are posts with one word titles, or posts that are very short, or just generally lame.

Currently on Website In A Weekend, I’m producing out a large number of articles, some of which are more technical (and take more time) than others.

But in all cases, when I feel the article is “good enough,” I pull the trigger and publish to get the permalink into Google’s index. I have read that this strategy is called “Publish, then polish” (watch for an upcoming article explaining publish then polish in detail). It goes against every bit of formal training I’ve ever had as a writer, where “quality” is the only overriding concerning, articles take a long time to produce, and inaccuracy is severely punished. Unfortunately, long, in-depth and technically detailed articles on blogs are punished by the “lack of readers” effect.

Using “publish then polish,” Google is now indexing me everyday, sometimes within hours. My highest traffic post so far published on Website In A Weekend was published the morning WordPress 2.8 was released, and got a couple of dozen hits by the end of the day. It continues to get traction. But there’s good posts on this site which haven’t yet gotten a couple of dozen hits total.

Right now a couple of dozen hits is pretty good, for any post.

Website In A Weekend doesn’t have many other readers yet. Google is probably the most active consumer… although Google sends very few search results this way.

At some point this will change. [Update 7/6/2009: in the three weeks since I wrote and scheduled this article, my daily traffic as roughly doubled!] When I do start getting traffic, I won’t feel compelled to write quite as much, and will concentrate on more refined output.

Until then, cranking out content in bulk seems to be the correct strategy. Long time readers know I’m on a schedule to complete 101 articles on WordPress, which is tentatively complete around August 10, 2009.

Whether the “publish then polish” strategy leads me astray in the long term remains to be seen.

What’s your experience?