How exactly are rankings updated?

[wariental]

Ok,

Lets say I have a website on Page 9 that was last cached a week ago. I have gained 60 highly relevant links. These links have been crawled by Google, will my rankings move up with the next cached date for my website or is the cache date and rank update not relevant to each other?

I have always been under the impression that if lets say my site has been cached by google on June 9th, and on June 10th and 11th I acquired 100 great high links that my position would only update with the next cache update of my website (assuming the links I acquired have been crawled and cached), however, recently a friend has told me that the ranking update is not determined when the last time your page was cached.

I have seen my rankings move up or down slightly without my page being cached after I just got some links but this is usually because the websites around me just gotten updates and my position is moving down or up dependent on how their sites moved.

Can someone please clarify if Ranking update and Last Cached Date are tied in together or are rankings not dependent on this at all?

Hopefully this makes sense lol..

[wheel]

Generally accepted info around is that the two are not tied. Rankings apparently are updated on a continuous basis, not a discrete '9:00 Tuesday' type of schedule anymore.

As for links taking effect, again it's generally accepted that links gain more traction the older they are. So get 100 links and expect little to no change for some indefinite period of time.

I could be wrong though :).

[wariental]

So your saying that you can move up from page 3 to 1 without having your site re-cached...(assuming u have the link juice) by re-cached I mean when you click to see the cached result and it gives you a date.

I usually only see movement when the cache date is updated, otherwise my rankings are stagnant aside from when sites around me are being cached before mine then obviously my position moves up or down depending on how they are moving in the results.

It shows that the two are connected, at least from my experience, but I would definitely like to know if I am wrong on this.

[zulu_dude]

I'm just going through the process of obtaining links for a relatively new site and am monitoring the site's progress on a regular basis... it seems as if its position is fairly consistent throughout any particular day, but small incremental steps are made from one day to the next.

[wheel]

Well, I don't follow this so I don't speak authoritatively. But I believe Google has already said that they do updates on an ongoing basis now.

[jimbeetle]

But I believe Google has already said that they do updates on an ongoing basis now.

That's my understanding, also. New data is continuously/periodically being fed into the system.

[awaisashraf]

What i believe is that Crawling a website and detecting a link are both different procedures.

As you get a link back, Google updates its data and changes the ranking if a site deserves it, according to its algo.

[bluntforce]

I'd say the cache date of the site(s) linking to the original site would be of more significance. Google isn't going to know about inbound links until they crawl/cache the sites providing those inbounds.

Sites having more "juice" will probably be crawled on a more frequent basis which means the inbound links will be found and considered in the ranking process sooner. Sites without as much presence won't get crawled as frequently, thus their links won't have immediate impact.
That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.