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You might assume that constantly updated content would attract attention from search engine bots. That would probably be a safe assumption, except that the one thing I know to be true in this game of search engine optimization is that you can assume nothing.

One of the reasons I launched this site was to test some of my theories on search engines. This “constantly changing content” theory of mine (what I normally would have assumed) does indeed appear to be correct.

I’ve been thrown to the top of MSN for several key phrases. (By the way, those of you looking for The Simpsons porn are just sick.) Apparently, the ever-changing content works well if you want MSN traffic. I’m only getting a few people coming through from Yahoo or Google, which leads me to believe that MSN cares more about frequently changed content than Yahoo or Google. It is obvious - based on these stats - that frequently changed content gets MSN’s attention and keeps it for a while.

I haven’t quite figured out what makes Yahoo tick. It seems that without inbound links with target phrase anchor text, it’s hard to rank well in Yahoo. Of course, it seems that everything Yahoo does tries to imitate the almighty Google, so this should be of no shock at all. As for the new content getting Yahoo’s attention, based on these numbers, it seems that Yahoo comes more frequently at first and then levels off. This leveling off behavior makes sense. Really, the only page in the site that gets changed is the home page. Does MSN spider a domain based on the frequency of updates on the home page? It doesn’t seem like that would be a very logical thing to do, but it is the type of thing I would expect to see from someone with a whopping 3% of the search engine popularity.

Google’s traffic patters intrigue me. 67 hits last month to (a predicted) 685 this month is worth considering. I made a major change to the site late May 2005. Since then, I’ve had almost zero people find me through Google (read: sandbox). So then does this high level of attention mean that moreron.com is emerging from Google’s sandbox? And does it also mean that frequently updated content will get you out of the sandbox faster? More tests are needed, but it’s an interesting theory.