Webmasters should take a fresh look at their site to stay competitive, Matt Cutts says

Digital Marketing, Industry News By Rhys Little, 17th January 2014

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search spam, has advised webmasters to take a new look at their current website and to continue updating it in order to stay competitive, reports searchengineland.com.

In a new video, Cutts explained that the main reason why older websites often lose their positions on search engine results pages (SERPs) over time is because the owners don’t keep them updated enough. Sometimes, this is due to the fact that webmasters are worried about changing anything when their site has ranked well for quite some time, as they’re concerned that any change might negatively affect their position.

Cutts stated that site owners should take a “fresh” look before becoming outdated and losing visitors.

“I wouldn’t just say ‘I’m number one for now and everything is great’ because newer sites, more agile sites, more hungry sites, more sites that have a better user experiences, they can grow and they can eclipse you if you don’t continue to adapt and evolve and move with the times,” he explained.

Duane Forrester, senior product manager at Bing, also said in a recent blog post that sites shouldn’t be depending on their past search engine optimisation (SEO) successes. He added that focusing on one strategy, whether it’s in SEO, social, paid search or email, is also a bad idea and probably won’t do anyone any favours. Instead, site owners should constantly be prepared to change and keep up with what currently works.