Publishing frequency is not a ranking factor.

What freshness actually means

There is a real behaviour underneath the myth, and it is narrower than the retelling. For some queries recency is part of relevance: news, prices, sports results, anything where last year's answer is wrong. For those, Google favours recent results. For a query like how a mortgage works, a thorough page from three years ago beats a thin one from Tuesday, and no amount of publishing changes that.

So freshness is a property of the query, not a reward for the publisher. A site posting daily into a subject with no recency requirement gets nothing for the frequency. It just has more pages.

What a cadence target costs

A quota has to be met whether or not anyone had something to say that week, and the predictable result is pages written to fill a slot. Those pages are thin, because there was no material, and they overlap the pages you already have, because the obvious subjects were used up months ago. That is cannibalisation: two pages splitting the authority one would have concentrated, competing for the same result.

It also degrades the site's average. Publishing a hundred pages a year where eight are good and ninety-two are filler means most of what Google sees when it samples you is filler. And it costs real crawl attention on larger sites, which is the one place crawl efficiency genuinely bites. The tempting fix, generating the filler faster with a model, does not help, because the problem was never who wrote it.

What outperforms it

Updating what already ranks. The highest-return content work on most sites is not a new post, it is taking a page sitting at positions five to fifteen and making it genuinely better. It already has links, history and demonstrated relevance. A new page starts from nothing.

Merging instead of adding. Three overlapping posts consolidated into one strong page, with the others redirected, usually outperforms all three and removes the competition between them. Subtractive work is unglamorous, hard to put on a content calendar, and frequently the thing that moves.

Publishing when there is something to say. Which means an irregular schedule, and that is fine. A page exists because someone needed the answer, not because Thursday arrived.

Where consistency does help

Not for the algorithm, for you. A regular slot is a forcing function that stops content being permanently deprioritised by more urgent work, and it builds the habit and the audience. That is a genuine operational argument and worth keeping.

The distinction that matters is what happens when the slot arrives and there is nothing worth writing. Under a ranking myth you publish anyway, because the streak is the point. Under an honest reading you skip it, because the streak was never counted, and the filler would have cost you something. Keep the rhythm as a working habit and drop it as a target, and you get the discipline without the debt.