Mind boggling how many updates we have had this year. They seem to come almost weekly.
Although they are all different, there seems one common trait - major search terms get indexed almost immediately when a new update comes out, but long tail results tend go into a confused state, only to slowly recover over about a 4 day period after the update. If I pick an update that was favorable to me, I will see an immediate increase in the quantity of google organic referrals, but, at the same time a marked decrease in conversion rate - the conversion rate then recovers to normal over 4 days.
Problem is, with weekly updates, that leaves the long tail search quality in a very poor state for about half of the time! We know that google is aware of this because they can see the performance metrics. There have been 100s of posts in this forum about low quality long tails, zombies etc. Why cant they speed up the index process so that their intended update takes effect faster? The only logical conclusion to me is that they just don't have the horsepower to do that. Why then not just delay the rollout until all of the data is crunched? Wouldn't this be better for their users?
