Hey there, /r/SEO. I'm a freelance content writer, and I made a post a while back about a client of mine who has an odd SEO-related misconception. This misconception is a time-waster, and he really seems to earnestly believe that it affects SEO.

Here's the basic recap: my client, who to my knowledge is an SEO professional, believes that mashing the update button 30-50 times on a new post on Wordpress will force Google to crawl the site sooner.

I'm required to draft the posts live, rather than scheduling them in advance like I do for most clients. That's somewhat okay, although from a UX perspective, it seems odd that someone would come to the blog to find a half-finished article at the top that's being completed incrementally.

But I'm supposed to hit the update button 50 times now, up from 30. This is in each 700-word post. To do so "naturally," which I'm supposedly supposed to, I would need to hit "update" about every 14 words. Go try to write a 700 word article. Every 14th word, stop and hit a button. Does that sound reasonable to you?

So, I end up typing letters and gibberish so that I can repeatedly hit the "Update" button to get the revision count up. This is a colossal waste of my time.

Supposedly, he's brought in some kind of outside SEO consultants to help him boost the site's ranking for our main keywords. The site is already on the first page for most of them, but not in the #1 position. (It's a local plumbing business on the East Coast.)

I'm concerned that his consultants are full of BS, and/or taking him for a ride or taking advantage.

What I think might be happening is what someone in my original thread suggested to me. I think that he and/or these outside consultants are confused about what it means when people say that Google takes update frequency into consideration. I've always been under the impression that "frequent updates" referred to adding fresh content to the site on a regular basis, along with occasionally going back and adding to older evergreen posts.

Is there a polite way to bring this up with him? Mashing update 50 times and having 50 revisions/drafts in Wordpress is not going to force Google to crawl the site any sooner, as far as I am aware. Furthermore, it eats up time that I could be spending creating or improving content. I am already spending too much time on this client, relative to the rates he's paying me. (Don't ask, the rates have gone down over time, and it's embarrassingly low at the moment.)

Any advice is appreciated, although I think I just wanted to rant about the general ludicrousness of the situation.