How does Google update credit for links?

[mancunian]

So when Googlebot visits my webpage it obviously reads the content and establishes what the subject matter is e.g. pet snakes.

It will also read the internal and outbound links on the page. It may have previously found inbound links to my page from other websites or other pages on my website (and may not have decided to crawl my page at that point).

At what point in time does my page get credit for these inbound links? Is it as sooon as Google finds them or is it when it crawls the whole of my page content again?

[aristotle]

According to an old theory, which has always seemed plausible to me, google's algorithm initially gives only a small value (credit) to a newly-discovered link to your site. Then it begins to slowly increase the amount of credit, until after perhaps a year or so, it is giving the maximum credit that the link deserves (in the view of the algorithm). Then the given credit begins a very slow long decline as the years pass.

Of course this is an over-simplication, since other factors that affect the value of the link will also change over time.

[lammert]

Please provide a source which backs up your theory. A Google patent or a Googler mentioning it somewhere would be nice.

[aristotle]

Please provide a source which backs up your theory. A Google patent or a Googler mentioning it somewhere would be nice.

Well that's just an old theory that I saw years ago, but don't remember where. Might have been in an old thread here. Anyway, It was just some speculations. I'm pretty sure that it didn't come from google itself. It's not the kind of information that google would make public.

It stuck in my mind because it seemed plausible to me. If you want something straight from the horse's mouth (google), I can't give it to you.

[JS_Harris]

It's my experience that Google has many layers of evaluation. If you look at your search console you'll notice that when you publish a new page and interlink it the internal link data section is slower to update than the mobile friendliness section, for example. It's likely that being mobile friendly is evaluated and deemed more important than internal links.

You asked about incoming links, Google has said they evaluate many factors of a link before applying credit for each. Location on page, if it was there when published or added later, is it navigational, what authority does the site have, are the pages a good match together and well related etc.

Point is there are a lot of factors to be evaluated and you're not going to get a "final value" until they are. Link values change when any of those factors change too, if a page is fading into the internal link abyss by being pushed down 12 pages into a category section it won't give the "juice" it did when still fresh on page one of that cat and possibly still on the index page.

Your answer is "fluid".

[mancunian]

Thank you for all the feedback.