Is constantly updated fresh content still important?

I think that fresh new content is more important than ever at the moment. your friends are probably just blasting there sites with backlinks and brute force. in my opinion the more content you have and the more you update your website the better.

Hi,
Updating your site with fresh content is really matters for seo.
Of-course you need to optimize your website with some seo/sem techniques to get good traffic and to utilize the content of your website.
But having only the good content in your website will not helo with Seo/Sem/PPc.

Yes, ignore your friends that are "advanced" in SEO because they're wrong...

I think updating is important....not every day but it does carry weight supposedly this has become more important with recent algo changes

@ NRC1983

Google loves fresh, new content. It is a signal from you - the webmaster - to Google that your site is still alive.

Secondly, if you have just 5 or 10 pages on your blog, you will not target a lot of keywords. By creating every day just one blog post, you will have at the end of the month 30 different articles that can drive traffic from the search engines on keywords you never would know of.

Don't get me wrong. I don't say you have to write every day a blog post otherwise Google hates you. NO, Google just want to see once in a while (every week, every two weeks) that your site gets updated. Gets fresh new content!

Another effect is, as I mentioned earlier: If you have more blog posts, you target more keywords is equal to more visitors, more visitors is equal to more money.

And, and last but not least:

When your website has a lot of indexed pages/posts, you will become an authority and Google LOVES authority websites.

So, if you love writing blog posts, if you have time to write blog posts. Just do it!

You can also work one day on 10 blog posts and set in Wordpress time and date when they have to released..

For example
:

1 article today, on 22 november 2011 , one on 30 november 2011 and so on.

Hope this helped you !

Per Google...

Fresh, unique content is figured into their SERPs. So...the more the better. Plus...they like sites that are active.

Content is part of Google's algos now.

Comparing with other methods to promote a website, fresh and quality contents is the best way. Maybe it will take some time, but fresh and high quality contents are the base of a successful websites, common sense.

It's definitely important for SEO! It is probably the best and safest SEO method for any websites especially Google has launched a new algorithm that will enable sites with regular content updates to have good serps.

Read this and form your own opinion:

Official Google Blog: Giving you fresher, more recent search results

After the panda update google is going to provide the more fresh results as update within sec , minute or hour and so on.
As per the latest update google has make some parts in the results to provide more useful and recent result to user. As the parts are like recent events ,recurring events , frequent updates. And as in the recent events google is going to show the result that just update. So now it matters more for getting the more results.

I've been stepping up my efforts at creating content and adding about 4-5 articles a day (roughly 2500 words total). I don't know if it will matter or not, but I read on an IM blog that constant fresh content is very important now.

One thing that I've noticed is that it used to take Google several days or longer to index a new post on my blog. Now indexing occurs within minutes of posting.

With a new blog, how much content should be added from the start?

Constant new content will give your website a ranking boost so don't stop!

Google just rolled out 10 NEW changes to their ALGO, and that one (updated fresh new content) played a MAJOR part in how they choose to rank sites from here on out and even in the past. Just plays a BIGGER roll now....

GC

Constant New content was always useful in past and gain more weight age after google panda. It will add quality to your bolg and certainly help you to rank well. I would say initially you can daily post your blog than after some months you can even weekly add content in that still it would be ok.