According to a recent Blog Herald post, frequent publishing is one of the most recognizable traits of a popular blog. And it’s a sensible tip–publish frequently so that your site stays fresh enough for both human readers and search engines to keep coming back to.
Is there such a thing as too-frequent posting, though? I would say that for blogs, there is only such a thing if you consider the front-page life-span of a post. While many users are already comfortable with reading content on their RSS feed readers, most are still accessing your site via the front page. This means they type in the URL on their browsers, hit enter, and land on your site’s main page.
So in that regard, it does pay to keep the important stuff at the front page, at least long enough for people to read it. If your front page displays five posts at a time, and you publish twenty posts in a span of one hour, then chances are those 15 other posts pushed to 2nd, 3rd and 4th page status don’t get as much exposure as the last five ones.
Some bloggers like to delineate between regular and important posts. So how do you keep important posts on the front page? One trick here is to re-design your site such that posts tagged as “features” become “sticky” ones, meaning they stay on the front page even when they’re already overridden by newer posts in terms of freshness.
Still, experienced bloggers would recommend a posting frequency of one to three times a day. That’s frequent enough to be considered fresh, but not too frequent that people are not overwhelmed by the postings. At least this goes for one-blogger blogs.