Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For you guys constantly tweaking, and in more competitive catagories than I am in, what are you seeing as far as changes?
Are these really rolling changes? (A couple of examples:)
If you make significant changes to a page (say, different title), and google crawls and shows a new cache date, WHEN are you seeing those changes you made take place in the serps?
If you get a link from a really good, high PR on topic page, once google crawls THAT page, how long are you seeing before you see it affect YOUR page?
With changes to links:
Far harder to check. If you know how often the site linking to you gets crawled then you can guess at when Google has seen the link. But how long it takes to 'trust' it and use it - if it does at all?
First, does Google credit it at all? Second, does it need the link to age before it trusts it? I'd say it could depend on the link content (its relevance to the linking site and to yours), the site's standing in Google, even where on the page the link is. It's been said that links from 'authority' sites are trusted and may be counted straight away.
You can use the link: command to your site and see if it shows up there, but Google deliberately make this data incomplete. They don't show all the links they know about, so it's far from certain that they count the ones they show.
I think the best rule of thumb you can use is to see if the page your link is on is in Google's index (preferably the regular one). If it is then I'd assume that Google counts it - anytime from now to 'eventually'.
Google first downloads and caches the pages, then analyzes them offline, builds, modifies the relevancy matrix of a site, sets its scores according to the available link data, checks linking patterns and so on. On-page changes are published with but a spam check, but link scoring is handled with pre-emptive care. Or so I think, based on experiences and many people here assume the same.
Relevancy scores seem to be calculated as a completely different task. Sometimes it feels like as if the index itself ( ranking sites based on these scores + filters + trust/localrank ) is a completely different department, only USING the data that the relevancy calculator throws out. Which means the site may show the same data for a week or weeks before being moved to a new position on the SERPs ( once the new score is passed to the index to actually go with the data displayed ).
Perhaps everflux is more of a stunt. Massive data refreshes still seem to be occuring only once a month, what we discuss on a daily basis is Google engineers tinkering with filters, making modifications to the emphasis of different parameters, and not the scoring.
That's what I see at least.
My experience is that links take anything from a week to a whole month to be accounted for, even after the pages they are on have been crawled.
I'd add to this that some links seem to take effect in steps... but it's hard to separate that out, of course, from the slower relevancy calculations that Miamacs describes.
I've also often seen on Google that newly optimized content, if not "reconfirmed" by quality external inbounds, will tend to drift down over a period of weeks, whereas on Yahoo existing inbounds will often push the content up. This could have to do with different valuation by these engines of link quantity vs quality.
This is not like the good old days of InfoSeek, when you could make onpage changes and see your pages move up in the serps within hours.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:27 am (utc) on Feb. 26, 2007]
