Continuous Update - looking for evidence

Yes / no / Maybe? ARRRGGGHH!

[projectphp]

OK, Everyone keeps saying "We are living, in a continous update world, and I am a continuous update girl" (sorry for the rip off Madonna), but does anyone have any actual proof?

People keep arguing back and forward, but having read almost every post, all I see are rehashes of the same old rumours, respun as truthes, until the origin of such belief is lost in the mist of forum threads past.

So, my questions are:
1. For thoise taht believe, what are you basing this assumption on, apart from the lack of an update? (REMEMBER: Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack)
2. Has anyone seen a change in the number of backlinks for their site since the last update, or seen links updated on different sites on different days? (this would be a good indicator)
3. For those that do not believe, how long before no update does equal rolling update?
4. What effect will this have on Link Rep and PageRank, and how often will these elements be updated?

I am starting my own investigations, with the following being my basis for a conclusion:
1. Backlinks changing on different sites on different days.
2. PageRank changing on different sites on different days.

Any other suggestions?

Cheers.

[EquityMind]

I just ran through my analysis tools. Traffic started to increase tremedously on July 29th and keyword search terms for my 'second layer' of pages are suddenly ranking extremely well. If we didn't go through a dance, how did I suddenly get several hundred pages and possibly several thousand SERPS rankings on the 29th and continuing since then? All on PR0 pages with no backlinks showing. I had noticed this in late June when my 'first layer' pages made it into the index and I began to drive traffic. When they were first indexed and getting high rankings they were PR0 but within a week or so the were showing as PR1. I just shrugged it off initially and thought it was a fluke and I got lucky.

Even though I have low PR rankings for these pages, I am beating out some pretty major players in the SERPS including Yahoo and other big sites that i don't want to mention or it will give away the industry. Now I am beginning to wonder about a fluke incident as the rankings are holding strong. This might prove incremental indexing....

EquityMind

[twilight47]

I think you need to draw yourself away from is the toolbar PR, and the displayed backlinks. I think that's what google wants.

Why is this? Why does Google promote there toolbar with the PR? Will they discontinue this feature?

Enquiring minds want to know.

[willybfriendly]

a search for the term "zyborg" shows WW at #4 with no fresh tag. First post in that thread was 7/27/03.

WBF

[TheDave]

twilight47, personally I hope not. The pr meter for me, as a user, has become a fairly good indication of a sites popularity, and I have become quite accustomed to glancing at the pr meter when I visit a new site, whether through google or via a link. Again, from a users point of view, with the most minor of interest in SEO, I read a lot of what gets said here, and I as Marcia says - 'people have been playing pr like a fiddle' - so it wouldnt suprise me if google did remove the feature, or a least neuter it a bit. It may also be that it's just on the back-burner, while they get the incremental update happening smoothly. Nobody knows <scary>woOoOoOoO.

[sit2510]

>>> I think you need to draw yourself away from is the toolbar PR, and the displayed backlinks. I think that's what google wants.

I personally think another way round and believe that PR toolbar is working better than before and now displaying a more accurate PR of a given page in its last iteration cycle.

To give an example - Before Dominic and Esmeralda, PR toolbar can easily be decieved by unethical SEO and webmaster eg. the use of robots.txt file for the linked pages. If you got an index page of PR6 and put the linked page at the same root level of index page and then add robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from crawling that linked page. The toolbar will be *DECEIVED* and show PR5 for that linked page though that page has never been crawled nor known by Google. Now toolbar is smarter and display the PR for what that page is worth for.

The only problem is that it does not display "real-time" PR.

[sit2510]

Back to the question on the thread.

>> Continuous Update - looking for evidence
Yes / no / Maybe? ARRRGGGHH!

I think it depends upon one's interpretation of the word "Update"!

If it means - new index, new backlinks, and new PR, then the answer is "NO".

If it means only for new index - then "YES".

The phenomenom that we are seeing now is like a "constant everflux" with higher frequency and more vibration.

[HitProf]

My guess is the update as we know it has been devided into more independent processes:
- freshbot as usual
- deepbot pages added/updated more often (weekly?)
- backlink/PR recalculation as usual (monthly/6 weeks?)
- algo tweaks and spam filters when they feel like it

All these processes seem to occur independently nowadays.

We could still call the recalculation of backlinks and algo changes 'updates', I don't think just adding and refreshing pages deserve the name anymore :)

[Namaste]

I can verify that there is continuous update happening:
1. I have had 1000s of new pages indexed
2. Title tag changes to 100s of old pages have been revised

The correct new name for DeepFreshBot is SmartDeepFreshBot. Here is what it is doing:

1. It crawls your site, if it finds new links it goes after those pages. PROOF: For some old pages, where I changed the title tag, I placed additional links on my site on level 2 pages: they were re-indexed

2. The BOT also determines if your page is actually fresh. It 1st crawls and works out a score for the page based on all the code. If it finds that score has changed as compared to the old score, it re-indexes the page. PROOF: Pages where I have dynamic content are being re-indexed very quickly.

[doc_z]

I found the following hint (no proof) against a continuous update:

Approximately two month ago I removed the incoming links of one of my pages. This page had no external incoming links thus it's now an orphan. Therefore, (if back links were updated) the page should be removed from the index or (at least) rank low. However, it is still #1 (of 20000). (I found similar behaviour for numerous other pages.)

Thus it seems that backlinks are not updated. (I would guess that PR is also not updated.) However, (as already mentioned) anchor text seems be continuously updated.

[subway]

I agree with doc_z - I purposely removed all links to one of my sites (only other sites of mine linking to it in the first place) - about 6 weeks ago. Still shows them - but more interestingly still at the top of the SERPS for 2 pretty competitive keywords / 80k results approx.

Proving ... GG isn't being 100% truthful when he says that all back links should be up to date.

[projectphp]

Proving ... GG isn't being 100% truthful when he says that all back links should be up to date.

I don't know about that. Seems like people are drawing a lot of conclusions from not much evidence.

I have run (for about the last week) allinurl: and link: over the two big newspapewrs in Australia, as well as checking the PR of a few pages. The allinurl: count changes daily, but link has been completely static, as has PR. Given that most new urls will point to the home page, that would indicate that, at the very least, links aren't constantly updated.

Rolling update? Batch processing? Not really sure. More data needed.

That said, rolling update seems pretty likely, or at the very least a new form of Dance, split into a couple of discreet sections. I think HitProf's ideas sound pretty reasonable, and are a "best guess" IMHO.

[Jesse_Smith]

I've notice that my new pages are added as if it's the freshbot also doing the job of the deepbot, but are not deleted, about twice a week new files are added, but don't get deleted. This method is much better than it used to be. GoogleGuy was right when he said we would like the new method of updating. I just don't see PR and back link numbers get updated at this rate.

[Beachboy]

On my end, some new page additions seem stalled and have been for several weeks. Whatever update process is involved seems erratic to me.

[steveb]

Backlinks just updated. Yahoo at 1,100,000 on www.

[indigojo]

Yes steveb i'm seeing the same for yahoo backlinks on www WEIRD

Searched for pages linking to www.yahoo.com. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,100,000. Search took 0.17 seconds.

[steveb]

And NEW PAGERANK on -fi!

216.239.57.100

[BryantStevens]

It looks like www-cw is showing updated backlinks for my sites.

[doc]

Not only am I seeing the 1,100,000 backlinks for Yahoo but my PR on my home page just went up from 5 to 6.

[TheDave]

I'm seeing 1,100,00 on gw and cv. Cue the music! ;)

[Markus]

See new backlinks. But rankings appear to be about the same...

[doc]

Just O so very briefly I had a PR6, now back down to PR5.

[sudden]

Just a small thought - Maybe it would be a good idea to join the two "new backlinks / rolling updates" threads (or lock one)? I feel the discussions in these two threads are going in the same direction (and probably there will be *some* posts there in the next few days).

Would be much easier to follow the discussion.

[g1smd]

>> I'm seeing 1 100 000 on gw and cv <<

That'll be gv and cw I think.

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