Google "deep crawl" and backlink credits?

[Decius]

I'm sort of out of the loop, but not entirely, but thought it would be good to get some feedback on this.

If you add a backlink, how long does it take for Google to count this for the topical nature of your site and affect the rank fully?

What I mean is, for it to be totally consumed by Google and taken into its ranking algorithm, not just temporarily.

Related to this, is a "deep crawl" still just once a month? And if so, is this when all the calculations are done? So does that mean, in general, your backlinks will have no effect in between that deep crawl?

Thanks.

[tedster]

This is a tough question to give a precise and tested answer for. So what I'm saying is a general impression based on working with a lot of sites, and I'm going to try to separate fact from impression.

Fact: A major reason for the new Caffeine infrastructure was to allow small amounts of crawl data to be integrated into the rankings very quickly - rather needing to wait and run recalculations only over large sections of the index at once.

Fact: Not everyone experiences a deep crawl at the same time - and it is not always once a month.

Impression: Full integration of backlink influence is extremely variable. It can be a couple days, and depending on trust, redirects etc it can take months. Some types of links (esepcially social media) seem to show their ranking influence almost immediately, but the value fades very rapidly, too.

Other types seem to grow over time - gaining power with age. And at a certain point, usually years, they start to fade in strength depending on the sites and pages involved, whether they stay active, how their own backlinks grow or vanish... too many factors for me to pin down with certainty.

[Decius]

So aside from the types of links (sort of facetious which are quick and quickly forgotten or deep and valuable) for the most part would you say that the trust of the site being linked to or the trust in the sites linking to the site play a large part in how quickly they are used to calculate rank?

And in a worst case scenario (PR of 2 or 3) when you say months, would you say something like 6 months, or something more like 3?

Thanks.

[tedster]

More like three - but it's so hard to test with all the factors moving around. Freshness (for queries that have a freshness tag) is going to pop a ranking really fast, but it may not be just the link generating that effect.

[Decius]

Another related, sorta, question is if a link is made through a redirect (such as an intermediary page that redirects it to keep logs of the clicks) does google count this exactly as a direct link or is it less effective?

Again, historically I was under the impression that it was almost useless, but now Google's probably smart enough to use it perfectly well.

Edit: it's a 302 FOUND redirect.

[leadegroot]

302s rarely pass any value (I'd say 'never' but I hate to say that...)

[Decius]

What is the reasoning behind that belief of yours? Is there some legitimacy to Google's decision not to pass value for them?

Is this the general consensus (asking others)?