Content Change: How long before Google updates ranking?

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ScreamingMidget

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If you change the content on one of your webpages, I'm wondering how long you think it takes before rankings are updated accordingly and how do you know? I'm using rank tracking software and making onpage updates to try and improve the rank, before I move on to offsite SEO such as backlinks.

Is it when Googlebot visits that particular page, or something else?
 
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It takes up to a week or 10 days from what I have been experiencing.
 
I have been searching for something similar lately with the cache
My guess is it's depend on bots crawling, the age of the domain,how often you publish, ect
sometime your fresh post is indexed and ranked in some hours, while a changed content take some days
 
misteryou. said:
I have been searching for something similar lately with the cache
My guess is it's depend on bots crawling, the age of the domain,how often you publish, ect
sometime your fresh post is indexed and ranked in some hours, while a changed content take some days
Click to expand...
I've notice that, also. I've seen posts that are usually indexed the same day while modifications to posts and static pages may take a bit longer to update.
 
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So it sounds like it's whenever Googlebot crawls that particular page and until that happens no ranking changes should be put down to because the content has been changed?

Perhaps a saved filter in Google Analytics would work, that only shows Googlebot's crawls, so if you make a change to webpage A, you can wait until webpage A has been crawled again before doing another rank check?
 
Rankings update once the change has been cached. Check with site:domain or cache:url in Google.
 
tb303 said:
Rankings update once the change has been cached. Check with site:domain or cache:url in Google.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about this? I've read that cache has nothing to do with rank changes and that the frequency of cache is simply down to traffic. The more traffic a page gets, the more often it's cached.
 
ScreamingMidget said:
Are you sure about this? I've read that cache has nothing to do with rank changes and that the frequency of cache is simply down to traffic. The more traffic a page gets, the more often it's cached.
Click to expand...
Well i can obviously only speak for my experiences.

Im on my phone so cant search very well but take a look at the screen grab on this post i made
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...-content-will-affect-ranking.html#post7271392

Also i think phpbuilt mentions it in his authority site guide.

But i disagree that caching speed is only related to traffic. If you have no google analytics or adsense on a site then how can google know its traffic?

IMO re-caching speed is mostly down to links and how often they bring in the spiders.
 
It all goes down to how "busy" the site is, which could refer to click throughs from search, traffic, links, etc.
 
tb303 said:
IMO re-caching speed is mostly down to links and how often they bring in the spiders.
Click to expand...

Guess it makes sense.

What do you think is the best way of monitoring the serps without having to go into my server logs. I've seen it a few times on Statcounter, but wondering if Statcounter will always pick up the spiders.

I could then do:

1) Notice googlebot has visited via Statcounter
2) Check rank and make note
3) Make onpage change
4) Await googlebot to re-visit page
5) Check to see if it's been recached
6) If it has, do another rank check and decide accordingly whether to revert or keep change
 
FutureProofSeo said:
It all goes down to how "busy" the site is, which could refer to click throughs from search, traffic, links, etc.
Click to expand...

Perhaps Twitter could help, if that's the case, to get Google coming back sooner, by tweeting out and getting people to visit the page in question. Unless it's only Google+ that would get Google to come back more often.
 
Google updates their ranking and status for particular website based on the value of that website, means the more important websites for Google (sites with High PR) get crawled and indexed very quickly (one example is YT) and less important sites get indexed and rank changes slowly.
 
There's one thing I'm sure has happened before.

I've made a change to the <title> and it's changed in the Serps (site:url), but a new cache hasn't taken place.
 
I've also noticed that changes showed up on my site but when I check if google bot came it doesn't say it did.
 
I've just checked a few of my webpages and noticed the <title> that I've changed in the last week has been updated in the serps. However, no new cache has taken place and the cached version is showing the old <title>

They must have visited my site in order to have noticed the change I made but for whatever reason, didn't update the cached version.
 
I moved my site from one server to another, the search results reflected a change in less than 12 hours.
 
In my experience, the google bot may take a week or more to crawl your site.
You can check it in GG Webmaster Tool Crawls Stats
 
MrshunE said:
In my experience, the google bot may take a week or more to crawl your site.
You can check it in GG Webmaster Tool Crawls Stats
Click to expand...

Crawl stats don't tell you much though. It shows how many pages were crawled on average per day over the last 90 days, but nothing about which those pages were and the date they were crawled.
 
ScreamingMidget said:
I've just checked a few of my webpages and noticed the <title> that I've changed in the last week has been updated in the serps. However, no new cache has taken place and the cached version is showing the old <title>

They must have visited my site in order to have noticed the change I made but for whatever reason, didn't update the cached version.
Click to expand...

ive seen that too with the titles. seem to remember the page cache updated soon after though.

so have your rankings changed when just title changed in google?
 
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