Do SERPs employ an timed adjustment period after making algo changes?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In light of the recent Mayday algo changes having cost one of my sites some long tail keyword traffic I did the usual of tweaking some things and cleaning up the site, nothing major and nothing I haven't done before.

This time however a good 60% of the pages were removed from Google, as determined by a site: command returning 40% of the number indexed a day before the changes. They are slowly returning.

Do search engines more quickly quarantine pages that change substantially immediately after a serp algo update? I haven't seen pages fall out of Google so quickly before and though they do return the speed of temporary de-indexing is impressive.

[tedster]

It does seem like that at times - and at this time in particular, when there are a lot of things moving around on Google's back end.

It also depends on what changes were made. If they affect PR circulation, for instance, that re-calculation can involve some extra time for trust checking. I don't think it's a set time period, however.

However, the site: operator is not a metric I would use - it's all over the place lately. Instead I'd look at the total number of pages actually getting Google traffic. It tends to be what you really care about anyway, and a lot of times URLs that are not showing up on a site: operator query still get search traffic.

But the core of your question is focused on whether Google takes some special vigilance around pages that change right after a significant algorithm update. I never thought about that, but it certainly makes sense.

If I were guiding Google, I would consider watching the period after an algo change very closely, and delaying the ranking affects of website changes that seemed to be taken in reaction to that algo change could make sense.

In other words, they wouldn't want to affect the data field right away, or give the website tweaker instant feedback.