After optimizing for Google - what do you notice?

[Tonearm]

After you make a series of changes to your site which you hope will give you a boost in the SEs, what do you notice happening and when?

The last time I made such changes, I think I remember the site getting less traffic from Google for a little while, and then more than it originally did. A few days ago I made some SEO optimizations, and now I'm getting a little less Google traffic than before. I'm hoping it eventually increases. Would that be fairly typical? What about a timeline?

[tedster]

I'd say it depends on what "a series of changes" means. For instance, anchor text and title elements are really touchy areas. I try very hard to get those two optimal on the first shot, and I rarely make tweaks there unless rankings are doing very poorly.

Given the historical data patent, I can easily imagine at least a temporary rankings drop for a while after a group of such changes. The only time I've been making such changes is when a clinet has already mangled those areas badly, and then I usually see a gradual improvement (recently at least) and not all at once.

I haven't seen such issues with making tweaks to copy, meta descriptions, etc. Also no such issues with natural growth in backlinks.

[Tonearm]

Thanks tedster,

So changes you make have an immediate and positive effect with the exception of anchor text and title tags?

[centime]

i think you should expect to wait 1 week at least, i have the impression that their continous updating might be an every monday kinda thing

Might make sense, afterall, a recompute of ranking factors might require extra computing muscle, so perhaps they have like a 1 hour window where they accept some degradation of network response time to get the updates effected

Just guessing based on my limited knowledge

[supafresh]

I have held off on any immediate changes to an optimized page for at least a few days.. I’ve made changes right after a page was indexed, and i ran into issues with 2 seperate pages in their datacenters and it absolutely screwed up my serps.

Freshbot vs Deep Crawl in seperate datacenters maybe?

[netmeg]

I think there also might be issues if you tweak too much too often. I had a set of pages for a client site in a murderously competitive field, and I was always always trying to tweak them and change this little thing or that little thing trying to bring up the ranking - sometimes several times a week. Then I had to put the whole thing on hold for about six weeks, because the client had some personal issues and had to put his business on hold for that long. Lo and behold, when he was ready to open up again, we'd risen to the top on nearly every phrase and for nearly every search term, and I hadn't touched anything for weeks. Left me wondering if stability doesn't mean something too. Of course, being an impatient sort, this drives me nuts.

[suggy]

what about Google's deliberate muddying of the waters? I thought they were trying to confuse cause and effect to hamper SEO?

Say you make changes to the content of a page. Improve the copy - not just twiddling with keywords, but actually manifestly change by expanding and rewriting?

I think this would take several weeks to sink in, no? I mean first of the page has to be crawled and reindexed. Then, if there are additional new links off, they have to be crawled too. Then some kind of recalc has to take place to determine new ranking, right?

And, then google has to decide when we get to see the outcome, no?

You've got to give it at least a month, surely?

Suggy

[octavc]

i have a question to a problem, which i think was met by a lot of webmasters. I read everywhere that you should update your site with fresh content daily or at least weekly to have good results in google searches. But.... what you should when you have a presentation site for a company which can't update it daily - not everyone is writing newspapers. I designed a website for a hotel and they were pleased with it and they didn't need to change anything. I have also designed a site for a shop, I put there their products, I had a good traffic for a about 2 weeks, then it went down. I don't have any other content to put into it. The site shows in google index at site:www.example.com but it doesn't show up in searches. Does anyone have a solution for sites with static content like these?

[tedster]

You've described the way new domains are most commonly treated in today's Google - a short honeymoon period (I think they are collecting some end-user data here), followed by a drop and then, slowly, a climb to your "rightful" place. Check out this thread: Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust [webmasterworld.com], which is always available in our Hot Topics area, pinned to the top of the foum's index page.

I read everywhere that you should update your site with fresh content daily or at least weekly to have good results in google searches.

This is not a universal truth - but it definitely is true for some types of websites. In fact, Google does tailor its measurements to different types of sites. A typical "brochureware" site that is continually playing around to try to beat the Google algorithm could actually hurt itself. An industry "news" site better have fresh content, and very often.

Taking this a bit further, the "SEO truths" for an adult webmaster are not the same as the truths for a corporate webmaster. A mom-and-pop business with a website gets different handling from a travel affiliate site. So I'd say don't jump into action based on anything you read -- it still may not apply to your particular situation.