standing advice to anyone who has achieved good placement in search results: Add a new page every day.

Most of us already know that if the content on a website is not kept fresh, it eventually falls off the first page of search results. But just how soon does that happen? A month? A year?

The answer: About 100 days after you make the last change to your website, Google at least, assumes that the website is stale and its position in search results drops off. It happens overnight and it can stop business in an instant.

I got a phonecall from an alarmed customer of mine last week. She said her phone stopped ringing the previous weekend. Looking at her Google Analytics, she quickly saw that traffic from search dropped from around 200 unique visitors a day to about 3 unique visitors a day. A few quick searches on the 'net and sure enough, her little business wasn't appearing on page one anymore for any of the search terms that always worked in the past.

Once Google sees your website as "stale", it's like when your campfire goes out: It's a lot harder to restart it than it is to keep it going in the first place.

The same is true of websites. My standing advice to anyone who has achieved good placement in search results: Add a new page every day.

My own experimentation with test websites shows up roughly the same pattern. Leave a website alone for 100 days and search traffic will all but disappear. Remember, though, that traffic coming links outside your website will still send traffic. And searches involving your company name are likely (but not necessarily) going to bring your website up.