For me Google is a black box. I do not know the details of what their algorithms do to determine what shows up in the results and what does not. But from my travels on the internet I have noticed that frequency of update is not too important – definitely not important in the 1-3 month range.

I check Google results all the time. I do a search for some keywords and click through the results. A lot of the results in my niche are websites that have not been updated in years. They have lots of good content and that seems to be all that matters to Google. From what I have seen if you have a good website, you can go on a 2 year vacation to the internetless Amazon and comeback to find your website is still at the top.

I use to worry on a daily basis that I need to add content or Google will assume I am dead. But now I see Google as the cousin twice removed who sends a greeting card every second Christmas just to check in and make sure everything is alright.

Rule of thumb in customer support is that for each complaint there are 10-20 people that did not bother to speak-up. And these are real customers, not some random hits of the home page or folks that click a couple of links and never come back. I would not discount is so lightly.

As to why people did not unsubscribe on RSS, is there any reason to? If I’m getting 50 feeds, and one does not show-up for a month, will I even notice or bother? I do not seek out to ‘unsubscribe’ from merchants who are not bombarding me with emails.

I have an old Blogger blog that I cut my teeth on, and even though it has not had a new post for several months, it still gets bursts of traffic. Simply because it has valid information for people who want to visit a certain part of Spain. As you say, to a reader it doesn’t really matter when it was posted.