Google updates

heard every 4 weeks, also every 8 weeks...

[visitob]

Hey All-
Long time reader, first time submitting a Q.
Part I. I've heard that google updates every month - is this accurate and consistent, does it vary each month?...Previous forum Q's say - end of December.

Part II. Whats the most effective way of checking to see if Google has updated - I usually do a link check - link:http://www....com. Any other suggestions?

Curious in Maryland

Thanks

[jamesyap]

Google update is call the 'deep crawl' and from the previous experience, it happens between 20 - 30 of each month. So the 'deep crawl' for december is coming soon.

Link check is a way, but another way is to stay here in the forum and someone will shout it out when the crawl happens! This is the fun of the forums.

[jdMorgan]

visitob,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]! (You too, jamesyap!)

The title of your post implies you have a question about the update cycle...

The update currently happens about once a month, at the end of the month. However, the data used for the update was collected at the beginning of the month. Therefore, the cycle is one month long, but any changes you make to page content or incoming links may take up to two months to appear.

If your site has good incoming links from high-PageRank sites, and is updated frequently, then your pages may be visited by Google's "freshbot." The result of this is a sometimes-temporary update of your position in search results, and an updated copy of your page in the Google cache. If the fresh bot does not visit often enough, this temporary change will expire, and results and cache will revert to those from the last deep-crawl.

Do a WebmasterWorld site search for "freshbot" and "Everflux" for more info.

Jim

[Marcia]

Welcome to the board, visitob and you too, jamesyap. To shorten your hunt for things a bit, the site search is up at the top, to the right of the WebmasterWorld logo. You might also like to look at the WebmasterWorld Google Knowledge Base [webmasterworld.com].

There's a very concise recap of the update/crawl cycle here, including a brief explanation of Everflux:

[webmasterworld.com...]

If you're just starting out you probably are unfamiliar with the terminology so it will be a little difficult to use the site search until you become more familiarized. After reading a bit, it gets much easier to be able to find things, since then you know what to look for.

Keep in mind that this month there's a holiday on the 25th, and again January 1st, so that will probably affect the timing of this month's update, which is generally around the 20th to the 28th, with the crawl starting right after.