How long does google take to update?

I am wondering how much google takes to update. I am trying to rank a wordpress blog (with an easy keyword). Do meta phrases, permalinks, mete tags, attributes and nofollow still work? Or are they useless with the new update?

they all still work

meta description- shows up in google under your title in the serps
permalinks - mysitecom/postname is better than mysitecom/08/12/postname in terms of seo
meta tags - google don't really use them anymore but other search engines do, so they are still good
nofollow- needed to make linkbuilding look more natural, just won't pass on PR from backlink

when you say "how long does google take to update?" do you mean your site improving in the serps? google has to crawl your backlinks and to do that you have to show google where they are, it can take a few minutes to a few days or weeks.

On the contrary, I created a wp site 5 days ago, added 1 article each day and all 4 articles were already indexed. No SEO not even G webmasters tool. I had the impression that cloudflare helped it indexed? Not sure though. I've only activated allinoneseo and akismet plugins. Not a single image found but I made sure to link at least 2 sites and not just my money site for each post.