Does editing already published posts have a negative affect on website?

Hi everyone, I have been working on my new site for a couple of months and finally went live last week. I have submitted sitemaps and waiting on pages to be indexed. My question is if I keep editing my posts to add internal linking and adding alt text to images (should have done this alt text in the beginning), I have also added some affiliate links, does this have an affect on how those pages are indexed?

On 1/18/2023 at 2:35 AM, LucyMac said:

I have submitted sitemaps and waiting on pages to be indexed. If I keep editing my posts does this have an affect on how those pages are indexed?

This won't have any detrimental effect. It can only improve the situation when it is eventually indexed. 

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

That is good to know, thanks Paul.

It shouldn't because when you make changes to an already published post, you're telling Google that this is a new version of the same content. As long as you properly mark up your revised content with the appropriate metadata, there's no reason why editing a post should have any negative impact on its search engine visibility. However, I wouldn't recommend doing it often, as Google and other search engines may see the post as being updated frequently, and give it a lower ranking as a result. Making frequent and substantive changes to the content could also be seen as spamming and could lead to a decrease in traffic. 

Thanks for that, Gerald. I’ll keep it in mind. 

On 1/20/2023 at 4:29 PM, paul2009 said:

I'm not sure where you read this, but the opposite is true. You shouldn't be concerned about updating your content whenever it is out of date. Updating genuine content to keep it current can improve your freshness score. 

Google will only consider it spam if you do things that violate their policies with the intention of manipulating rankings in Google Search results. For example, keyword stuffing (filling a web page with keywords or numbers), adding hidden content (like white text on a white background, hiding text behind an image) and so on.

Did this help? Please give feedback by clicking an icon below  ⬇️

I checked, and of course, you are right and thank you for correcting me. I wrote what I read on a blog a while ago without checking, my bad. (Talking about the part "being updated frequently")

No worries; glad to help. There's a lot of outdated and misinformed commentary out there.