Google update means Google Spider to Follow

[dvduval]

Based on some of the posts I've read, it seems that the Googlebot always spiders immediately following the monthly update. I'm not talking about the freshness bot. I'm talking about the bot that needs to crawl your site in order for you to be included in the NEXT update.

If this is the case (and I think it is), one of the most productive things you can do while waiting for an update is:
1) Finish any pages that you have been working on.
2) Churn out new pages like there's no tomorrow.
3) Update pages (especially the links that point to new pages you have recently created)
4) Have a new customer? At least get an index page up and running so Google will display your new customer's site a month from now. I might go so far as to say: Don't worry about having a 'pretty' page, just get the main text on the page.

How do you spend your time effectively when an update is close at hand?

[lazerzubb]

Google doesn't spider immediately after the update, but often a few days after the first view of it on www2, www3, there have been times when they have done the "big" spidering before the update, this is not the usual though.

Also i have launched a lot of sites (more than 10) the last 2 months, and all have been picked up by Googlebot within 48 hours, and indexed within 72 hours.
So i don't care that much anymore about the "Big" crawl, because Google comes to my sites every day anyway :)

But yes if you have a completly new site, and don't have a lot of inbound links or content that changes a lot, it's good to try to launch it before the "big" crawl comes.