when does google update their index?

[webwizard411]

When does Google update their index? :confused: I've heard once a month, but I've found that to not be true. Thanks in advance.

WebWizard411

[seobook]

constant crawl.

active important sites get crawled many times a day. inactive & uniportant (through the eyes of googles spider) sites may get crawled only once every few weeks or so

[bwelford]

To be precise, there's crawling and there's indexing and there's showing in SERP's. seobook has it right about crawling. A web page may be crawled and may not get into the index right away.

Even if it's in the index it may not have associated with it all the elements that will be used in the algorithm to determine how high it will be for any particular SERP.

For example, my current working hypothese is that back links to a web page do not get included in the algorithm for perhaps a month or two. In a sense they're in a sandbox, a term that rustybrick coined I believe. However he applied it to the notion that the actual web page sat in the sand box for a time.

Even beyond the time scale of whether web pages are included in SERP's is the time when a web page gets an adjusted PageRank showing in the Google Toolbar. I believe the delay is even longer on that.

[Anthony Parsons]

And for things that have come out of Google recently, the index is adjusted on the fly, not just crawled, however, the backlinks seem to only get adjusted monthly as said.

What you see is the on page factors seem to get indexed and move within a week or so of adjustment (for sites already indexed) though backlinks are only monthly. As stated already, the link debate is a little unknown whether G throws them in a sandbox for a while to kick them around and see what G likes and dislikes. I suppose they give themselves a little more time in the backlinks department.

[seobook]

a few months back I saw a backlink from a blog where the link was posted only 5 days before the update. sometimes it is just random in its cycle. i think recently they have decided to error on the conservative side and not hook up the links and their effect as quickly.

i have seen some sites where i built links for about 2 weeks ago and the site has already went from like #90 to #30 so they must take links into some account...

[Anthony Parsons]

I have also seen this Aaron. I establish some a week or so before an update and boom, there they are and others not until the next update. It could possibly be where the link resides, how far G went into a site on the last crawl, when they visited.....I don't know....I am stabbing into the dark with that one.

[webwizard411]

Well, I keep a constant eye on Google, and their # indexed pages counter at the bottom of G's homepage hasn't changed in a while. Why is this if they are doing a constant crawl?

webwizard411

[qwerty]

That number isn't linked directly into their index. They just update it when they feel like it.

For a while, they were in a battle with AllTheWeb for bragging rights over who had the biggest index. ATW would announce that they had so many pages, and G would immediately update that number to something bigger than ATW's.

If they updated it whenever they added a page to the index, it would be in constant flux. I think eventually they'll go the route of McDonald's and just put "Billions and billions of pages indexed".