Update Patterns

Are there any patterns to Google updates these days?

[Pedent]

Once upon a time, everyone looked forward to a monthly update. It was never quite monthly, but it was a definite event that everyone waited for with fear, trembling, and hope.

Then came Dominic & Esmerelda, and the monthly update was no more.

What has taken its place? I've read suggestions here that there is some kind of three day pattern to the SERPs update. I also read, just before my site's backlinks updated on the 26th, that the last backlink update took place on the previous 26th and so the next one should happen soon.

And so to the question: Are there any patterns to Google updates (whether SERPs, or backlinks, or PR) anymore?

[AthlonInside]

The update is continuos, with slightly changes everyday. I believe it happens almost every day. Just because everyone's eyeballs are focus on a few terms (that related to them), they would feel like changes only happens once in a few days. Assume you have the sight of ALL people, minor changes should happened all the time.

2nd, there is a thing similar to the dance, the backlinks update. Also around once a month. But that's really quick and does not affect the SERPs much because SERPs is affected continuosly as I say.

[Pedent]

Thanks for the reply. Would you say that the SERPs update continuously or daily? I only ever seem to see changes first thing in the morning (I'm in the UK). This could be because first thing in the morning it's longest since I last checked, so I'm more likely to see a change, or it could be because SERPs update at a specific time each day. If it's the latter, then it'd be nice to know so that I can stop wasting my time checking in the afternoon. :)

[theitboy]

for a while, a month or two ago, it seemed to me (and i think to other people on here) that there was a "biggish" change happening on some mondays. i haven't seen this for a while though.

are pr updates always occurring around sunday/monday, after three or four week intervals?

[MrSpeed]

I was going to ask this exact same question myself.

I have seen so many different theories that the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't think anyone knows what the pattern is.

Here is my 2 cents:
The displayed PR and backlinks are updated at different times than the PR and Backlinks used for the SERP calcs.

New pages/sites are very quickly indexed and rank well if linked to from a page with decent PR. The new pages then disappear from the serps until a permanent listing appears.

Some believe there is a three week cycle, but there never seems to be a consensus when it happens. Maybe the index is split into different groups and each group updates at a different three week interval?

[capsmaster]

I may be in the minority here but I have different experiences with our sites.

First comes the update in backlinks on one of the datacenters, no change in the SERPS for any of our websites even though backlinks have increased on a different datacenter.

Second backlinks are moved from the datacenter to googles main index. Still no changes in the results even though backlinks have increased according to google.

Third pr gets updated temporarily on the toolbar, it doesn't stay all the time and fluctuates back and forth from the new calculated pr and the old for 2-5 days but that is eventually what your PR will be after everything settles down. Still no changes in google.

Finally the pr stays stable on the toolbar, and google adds in all your backlinks and the results reflect those changes. You can tell the guys that did work last month and got more links and you can tell the guys that slacked and did nothing.

For the past 2 months this is what has happened for our sites. Now this month has been a little different.

On Tuesday we noticed an update on the toolbar for pr for 4 of our new sites and it has still been fluctuating between the new pr and old pr even today but we haven't seen any change in the rankings for the sites it is effecting.

But our old established site which added a bunch of new pages and links didn't get a pr update that was noticeable (still about 50 pr 0 pages today) but has shown a very nice increase in the rankings. So I guess I am hoping to see another change in the rankings maybe they started with the big boys first and are working their way down. Hopefully that is the case, or everything I just said has changed this month and the new sites won't see a boost in the rankings.

[Small Website Guy]

On my website I started at the end of August, suddenly at the beginning of this week, the toolbar finally said PR5! Wow, I was excited. (Thanks to WebmasterWorld for all the tips!) But since then it has been fluctuating from all the pages in the site showing various PRs, to all of them showing 0.

An hour ago it said 0. Right now it says 5 again.

[bether2]

Small Website Guy.

Hang in there. I think your home page will probably settle down to a PR5. I could be wrong though...

Beth

[Stefan]

The only pattern I see is that if you put up a new page, that gets a PR4+ from internal links from higher PR pages, then the page gets crawled and fresh-tagged almost daily, and keeps it up on an ongoing basis. If it's an older PR4+ page, buried a few clicks from the /index, googlebot only checks it on a rotating schedule along with all the other old PR4+ pages. I miss the good old deep-crawl... at least you knew everything would be checked every 3-5 weeks. Ever-fresh works fine on new pages but it can ignore older ones.

[plasma]

Stefan, many of us get full crawled daily.
If you have decent PR 5, maybe 4 too, and don't get full crawled daily you seem to have a problem.
I don't think it has to do with freshness.
Check your logs.
Look for anything unusual, that could have made googlebot angry.
Look for duplicate content and wrong redirects.
Each site should have distinct content, otherwise it has to be a 301 (not 302) redirect to the original site.

[Stefan]

I look at my logs faithfully every day... I even do a quick scan through the raw log files with wordpad. Googlebot hits about 20-30 of the 150 htm files per day. It has it's favourites, like the index, and main, and the new PR4+ pages like the weather, but I sure don't get the whole site crawled daily. How many of your pages that are getting hit everyday are recently put online? I have pages over a year old, buried somewhat, that it seldom looks at.

Anyway, my main pages get tagged most days and if googlebot doesn't like my W3C validated code, it can just p*ss off... Ink likes all of the pages fine and gets them faster.

Nice Google halloween graphic though....

[lawboy]

I was going to start a thread, but I'll post here.

I am getting quite frustrated with this whole search engine thing.

Our home page is PR6 and many of our pages are PR5. Anyways, we started optimizing a few weeks ago. The two-level and three-level deep pages get spidered almost everyday and have been optimized to the max. Yet 1/2 of them do not appear on google as new optimized pages, while the other half do. The non-optimized pages show the old titles and descrip on google.

As for the four-level deep pages, which are most of our optimized pages, they are not getting spidered. I've linked to them in the sitemap, I've put robot tags, and I've linked to them from level 2 pages - links embedded in paragaphs of text. Nothing works. And it's not just google, but inktomi and grub, etc.

We created almost 60 new pages of pure optimized content and 99% of them are not showing up. For the time and labor involved I would have been better off just using PPC.

[plasma]

if googlebot doesn't like my W3C validated code

Erm, if you are talking about your homepage from your profile, then it does not seem to validate.

[plasma]

I've put robot tags

What robot tags?
You shouldn't need them.
Usually you only use them to keep Google away.

[Stefan]

The home/index page of the site in my profile validates. I just checked.

The one you stickied me about just got fixed. It's a news page, man... I just try to get the news on it every day and check it every once in a while with W3C. It also happens to be one of the pages that gets crawled often.

[Jesse_Smith]

With my sites that have PRs/back-links, they get deepcrawled daily, and I think have one MAJOR deepcrawl each month (been geting Google-bombed since Friday, almost crashing the server.) While with new sites, they hardly get touched. Started making a new site about two months ago. Made one category and then linked to it on another site that was on the same topic. With in a day Google crawled that section. I kept adding more content and sections, and on 10/04/03 when I killed If-Modified-Since, BANG, Google crawled the whole site, but after that it's only got one file, the original index page, get's it almost daily and leaves, even with If-Modified-Since turned off, so I'm not sure what's up with new sites. (No, I don't have session IDs, or .cgi/php/asp files, all static .shtml files).

[Dave_Hawley]

For what it's worth, ouir site has had a homepage PR of 6 for a couple of months. Monday it dropped to 5 and backlinks dropped to 190 from 284. Since then the PR and backlinks have been up and down, sometimes 2 or more times per day.

What I am expecting is; in increase in backlinks from 284 to just under 400 and our homepage to increase to a 7. Whether this happens or not is anyones guess.

My conclusion, add content pages frequenly and make sure they are linked back to at least your homepage. Make sure all pages are linked in some way with basic HTML. Hunt down link exchanges with relavent sites, regardless of their *current* PR.

Dave