When can you be sure your changes are in effect in the SERP?

After the Freshbot, After the Cache date or after the next update

[lgn1]

With Google changing their behaviour over the past few years, their is a lot of inconsitent information regarding SEO.

Im currently working on maximizing rank improvement for on-page factors.

Its my understanding, with the everflux, your site should rank, for better or worse, when your page is changed, and google picks it up in either the Freshbot or the changes show up in the cache.
(I understand that you need to check across all data centers, as some data centers will show the update while others haven't).

Every six weeks or so, google changes its algorthim, and your site may change in rank due to this factor, which means you may need to start all over, if a google filter picks up on an overoptimization penalty.

Am I correct in assuming this is how Google works, these days.

We are ussally Fresh Bot or our cache is updated every 4 or 5 days. So does this mean we should see the fruits of any given SEO technique in less than a week?

[LuckyGuy]

>>Every six weeks or so, google changes its algorthim, <<

no it seems that g* changed from 6 week updates to a continuous change of algorithm. That means u could see your efforts within 5 days, sure, but although it could blast u out of index within 1 change u did in a very small periode of time.

[ronburk]

You're trying to measure what effect your changes had. Unfortunately, factors beyond your control, such as page age, and Google user behavior, can affect your ranking.

So, when your modified page moves up in the SERPs, was it due to your change, due to being 7 days older, due to 3 geographically separated Google users drilling down to page 4 in the SERPs just to click on it before you made your change, or due to one of the dozens and dozens of other variables you can't directly measure?

Hopefully, you have a whole lot of pages you can make structurally similar changes to and then observe the aggregate result to see if there are any discernible patterns.

[lgn1]

We are in a niche market, so our keywords are not highly competitive. We realize that their are offpage factors that will effect our ranking, but these are not going to change much between algrothim changes, and many of our pages are four to five years old, so five years vs five years plus 7 days is not going to make a difference.

In such a scenerio, onpage factor changes should have a measureable, if not significant impact on our rankings.

From a previous comment, I find it hard to believe that the google algorithm is changing constantly, otherwise sites would be jumping all over the place from search to search , which Im not seeing.

[tedster]

You are right -- the Google algorithm itself only gets a major change maybe a few times a year. But the various elements that are already in the established algorithm can also be "dialed up" or "dialed down" so they may have more or less impact at any given time.

Add to this the factor Google has called "everflux" which is caused by spidering and indexing new pages -- or new versions of existing pages. The back end scoring for this new data is continually making localized shifts in the SERPs, but nothing sweeping.