It has been established that having a 'blog' helps your web site gain visitors and higher rankings in search engines. But a small study which I have just completed shows that blogging is much more important than this. Blogging appears to be absolutely essential to your web site success. If you are not blogging, your web site will fade into obscurity.

Since blogging took off in the past year or so, there have been several 'theories' about it's importance. Some people have suggested that it will mean the end of journalism, as we all become our own 'reporters'. Others have predicted it will mean the end of civilisation as we know it. More practically, there have been several well sourced articles which suggest that blogging is a significant component in a web site's success. Sites that include a blog, the theory goes, will be rewarded by Google with higher positioning on search engine results.

Like all theories, there is only one way to find out if they are true and that is to put them to the test. So, I decided to test the 'Google ranking theory of blogging'.

My site, http://www.infoselling.com has over 200 pages in it, most of which are indexed by Google. Last week, one of those pages was consistently number one (out of 42,300) for the term 'infoproduct'. Two other pages in the site were ranked consistently at 12 and 13 (the top two slots on the second results page).

Up until this point I had been writing a daily blog at the site and 'pinging' it to the various weblog sites. To test the theory, I stopped writing my blog and then re-checked the results. Five days without blogging has had a significant impact. The page which was number one, is now number six. The pages that were at the top of page two are now at the bottom of page three.

It would appear that no other web pages for the term 'infoproduct' have been added to the Google list in the past five days since the number of pages in the results is still 42,300. The only thing that I changed in my site was the blogging.

Now, it's true that other sites may have changed and that I have suffered as a result. It may not be just the lack of blogging on my part. However, the top two pages are from a site which adds pages on a daily basis - and they were immediately below me while I was blogging away! Hence, whether you add content using traditional techniques, or you blog, the number one rule for maintaining your web site ranking in Google is add content - every day, without fail. As I've discovered, even five days can have a dramatic impact. If you are not adding content to your web site every day, you stand a very real chance of losing your place in the Google search results.