How long is long enough... to monitor for ranking changes?

[Zanet]

When it comes to monitoring changes
How long do you guys give in Google SERPs?

For example,
you tweak a page for keywords and wait to see whether ot works or not in the results

do you wait a week / month / 90 days
before you conclude it worked or didnt work?

Thanks again

[tedster]

If you're only making on-site changes, two weeks seems like plenty of time to me. When you get into link building, the time scales involved can slide into a strange time dimension.

[Victor1]

I find for changes that about 5-6 days after the page has been re-indexed, it will move if it is going to.

[MrFewkes]

I get the feeling that some changes dont change the rank, some changes change the rank within about 2 weeks, but some...........hmmmmmmm I believe some changes dont take effect until some kind of special update runs - maybe 3 monthly or so. Im not sure about this last bit - because I sometimes also thing - damn - my domain has aged over a year now - this may be why it rose and not due to my changes.

[HuskyPup]

I see my changes usually appear within a couple of weeks and so long as they are done correctly ranking improvements usually occur over the following 3-6 weeks.

[gouri]

Since this is on-site, I wanted to ask:

(1)For those of you who have added new pages to a website, recently, how long was it before you saw it in Google's index?

and

(2) Did changes in rankings that occurred by adding new pages to a website occur faster or slower than changes made to already existing pages?

[Shaddows]

You should see initial effects within hours, a day at the most. All first-order ranking will have taken hold within a week, certainly two.

Second-order effects (relating to you site profile/handprint/designation) will take place within 30 or 90 days. These tend to be dramatic, rather than incremental, and are best thought of as 'tipping points' or 'phase changes'. Normally a bunch of pages, or an entire domain, move around in SERPs after such an event. On large, mature sites, they are rare. On young, new sites, they are frequent and chaotic.

[seoN00B]

i only monitor once a week :)

[Simsi]

It will also depend on how frequently Google crawls the site and on top of that the static/dynamic status of a page. I reckon that largely static pages get crawled less frequently as time progresses.

[gouri]

Thank you Shaddows and Simsi. That was very informative.

The pages added were static, so I am thinking that it might take a little time for it to show in Google's index. I am going to see how long that takes and also when I see a change in the rankings.

[tedster]

It also matters whether Google has selected the query term as one that "deserves freshness". If so, changes will often be seen in a much shorter time frame.

[gouri]

I added a couple of pages to a site that I am working on and they have been indexed and also have a cache version but I have not seen a change in the rankings.

The older pages on the site don't have a cache date that is after I added the pages so when I look at them they don't show the additional pages added, and may not have the benefits of the new pages?

Have you guys seen on a site that is not very large that after new pages have been added, the cache version of many of the older pages have to be a date after the new pages were added in order to see the effect on rankings of the new pages?

[edited by: gouri at 5:38 pm (utc) on Aug 25, 2010]

[netmeg]

The shortest time I've seen so far was a blog post that was indexed and ranking in four minutes, towards the end of June. I suspect that was one of those "deserve freshness" situations. Most of the other blog posts make it in within 1-2 hours. As far as new pages on a static (non-blog) site - I just tricked out a few sites with some new pages, and most had them indexed in one to two days, although they're not really ranking for anything anyone would search for as yet.

On a somewhat related note, I switched a couple of domains over from www to non-www, and I'm wondering how long it will take Google to reflect that. When I've done it previously, it's been all taken care of within 1-2 weeks, but I'm going on five or six weeks now. The www 301s to non-www, there's only a couple pages on each, and I went into GWT and added the non-www and changed the settings. Still nuttin'. And I know they've been crawled, cause they got a couple new pages in.

[gouri]

As far as new pages on a static (non-blog) site - I just tricked out a few sites with some new pages, and most had them indexed in one to two days, although they're not really ranking for anything anyone would search for as yet.

With the new pages added to the static site, do you feel that rankings for keywords that older pages are ranking for are going to go up and/or the new pages will rank for keywords that your site is not ranking for at the moment?

Are you waiting to see the effects of the new pages that you added?

[netmeg]

Well they weren't as important as the pages that were already ranking, so no, I don't expect them to overtake the existing pages (which are already up at the top for every logical search) I didn't add them for search purposes, I added them for user purposes, although I'll be interested to see what if anything bring in via search.

[Shaddows]

Just to note, cache can be several days behind verifiable ranking effect- weeks on occasion, but that indicates a problem somewhere (either you or Google).

[freejung]

cache can be several days behind verifiable ranking effect- weeks on occasion, but that indicates a problem somewhere (either you or Google)

Yeah, I've noticed that too. Sometimes I'll see titles, descriptions, and ranking changes that definitely come from the new version of the page within hours, even though the cache doesn't update for a few days.

Any ideas on how to tell whether the problem is on your end or Google's?

I've also noticed the phase-change type of effects you mention, and the question there is, how would you go about deliberately triggering such a shift for a mature site? I seem to be locked into one "designation" (I like that idea, it makes a lot of sense) and can't seem to move the needle despite significant changes in architecture etc.

[freejung]

Oh, and gouri, I just added a new section about a week ago. I've also made some significant changes to existing pages.

1) Indexed within a day, ranking within about three days.

2) Existing pages flickered in and out of ranking for new keywords for about a day, then stabilized the next day.

But here's the odd thing that I'm having trouble figuring out: new pages, even once they stabilize, don't rank as well as very similar older pages. I have a pretty good feel for my niche and what it takes to rank. New pages just don't do as well as it seems like they should, often for several months to a year.

Even stranger, old pages, when re-optimized for a new keyword, don't rank as well as they do for well-established keywords of similar difficulty (basically synonyms really) for which they already ranked.

I've been experimenting with this to see if I can figure out why it is. I wonder if it has to do with second-order effects such as Shaddows described. Maybe it takes up to several months for the site "fingerprint/designation" to be updated to include relevance for a new class of keywords.