Does adding fresh content increase your rankings for your primary keyphrase?

If you are targetting a specifc BIG keyword with your index page, how important is it to add fresh content - does this really matter or is it all about getting as many high quality incoming links as possible?

If you rarely add new pages of content or edit your site but you are constantly adding new incoming links and this site has very few outgoing external links is it going to be successful?

I would rather not have to add content for the sake of adding content since this site is more of a directory of companies etc and the only real changes will be adding and removing listings. I can add a blog and do all kinds of different things if necessary and most likely will down the road but for now I would rather just focus on getting more links and not have to worry about constantly adding content to the site - unless I have to.

opinions plz.

There is not really a definitive answer for your question. Adding crap conetnt for the sake of it will not really help you at all.

The advantages of fresh content are:

1) It leads to you site being spidered more often so any changes to your site are picked up more quickly.

2) It increase your chances for ranking for more lontail keywords. New combinations of keywords can be added and found in the content.

3) It gives visitors a reason for revisiting your website and thus increases your chance of getting sales.

4) It can help increase your theme relevance and/or expand the areas which you wish to be relevant to.

5) It can make your site more sticky and thus reduce bounce rates which many think can hurt/help rankings.

6) It can generate organic links if the content is of the quality that others find useful enough to link to.

7) It allows greater use of social bookmarking boost effect on your site as the new content can be social bookmarked each time new content is added.

The disavantages are:

1) The time/cost it takes to create the content and the opportunity cost invloved in what else you could be spending your time/money on.

2) The dilution of Link Juice as the more pages on your site the more thinley your juice is spread.

3) The negative effects on your image if your site contains poor conetnt. If people enter through longtails and land on pages of crap then they will bounce very quickly. Thus giving you a bad image and a higher bounce rate which may negativley effect your SERPs

4) The loss of focus and targeting of new visitors that entrt your site. You can distract the visitor from what you want them doing.

Thus the issue is not the frequency of the new content but the quality of the new content. Personally I think adding crap to a site will on net be more harm then helpful. A well maintained, relivent blog with articles on topically interesting stuff can be of enormous benefit to a site.

Hope that helps

best of luck....

What do you mean by "The dilution of Link Juice"? I don't think add more content will thinley your juice if the content added is good quality and related to the theme of the website.

If you have 10 pages you juice is spread among the 10 pages if you have 20 the juice is spread among the 20. Matt Cutts has said in the past the main reason for pages going into supps is not enough juice comming into a site to keep all a sites pages in the main index (or something along those lines)..

well anytime you add more pages you dilute the amount of incoming link juice - whether its good quality content or not.

btw thanks for your original reply gazzahk - I thought I had replied already ;/

For my own project I won't be adding too much regular content - just mainly new sites into the directory and MAYBE MAYBE some kind of blog or maybe videos etc.

I doubt the existence of a 'fresh content' boost. The logic is simple, if fresh content is so important then every page in the top ten would have fresh content but we regularly see old pages dominating the SERP.

Fresh content is probably a factor with news type sites but there will be more to them ranking well for current events than just the freshness of the content and, of course, that content will then drop in the SERP once it's freshness fades.