What's the average rank update time after site and/or backlink changes?
-
What's currently the typical time, ON AVERAGE, it takes to see ranking changes when significant improvements are made to significant ranking signals on a long-established (as opposed to brand new) website?
Does the rank update associated with on-page optimization happen sooner than addition of quality backlinks?
-
Yeah, I mean with big news sites you can see that their articles get indexed by Google almost immediately after it's published. As you said, depends on the prominence of the site, as well as how deep the page is within the site structure. On ecommerce sites, sometimes you can see that product pages that are really deep within the site structure and buried amongst thousands upon thousands of other products won't have been crawled in like 2 months.
You can always check pages in Google search to see when the page was last cached or, if you're using Chrome, by appending "cache:" before the URL in the address bar (e.g. cache:www.moz.com). Gives you the date and time of Google's last cache of the page. Could always monitor that every day on another site for up to a week, and see how many times Google crawls it in a week to get an idea of frequency.
-
That makes sense so essentially you are saying the ranking update takes minutes to "sometimes hours" from the point that Google crawls and adds the changes whether for the target site or a referring site? Obviously on the target site you can see the crawl frequency through the Webmaster Console.
I would guess that it isn't that difficult to guesstimate the average crawl frequency of other sites based on working on a variety of sites and seeing how long crawls take to get updates. I've seen on prominent forum sites new forum posts appear within minutes. An old, outdated site with years old static content I would guess it gets crawled no more than once every???
So it would seem a reasonable answer to the question is 5 minutes to a week for the majority of sites ??
I would expect there are a lot of people on here though with long-time experience with a variety of websites that could confirm the typical average. "Hours to months" is a very wide range. Think of a bell curve where the middle portion of the curve represents 2/3 of all sites. What's the average rank update delay for the middle section of the bell curve?
-
i now fix. thanks for suggestion
-
You're more likely to get advice if you created your own question than hijacking someone else's, since it's a completely different question. Good luck!
-
I have also Question One, i don't understand how is this website : competitor website clashroyale-gemme .com/ beter them my website i analze i have more more backlink and my website is strong have good seo but not on first position, you can tell me what is problem, my website is 4-5# and competitor 1# ..
-
Depends on the frequency at which Google crawls the site. If the improvements are all on-site then you wait until Google next crawls the site, and you should see your rankings improve, or you can request a URL fetch and submit to index via Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl your site asap. Then you can see the position changes that very day - sometimes within minutes, sometimes within hours.
If the improvements made were off-site then the same applies, except that you can't request Google's Fetch URL tool. You just have to wait until those sites get crawled, and see what happens. Depending on how frequently Google crawls that site, it could take hours, days, weeks or even months.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Migrating From Parameter-Driven URL's to 'SEO Friendly URL's (Slugs)
Hi all, hope you're all good and having a wonderful Friday morning. At the moment we have over 20,000+ live products on our ecomms site, however, all of the products are using non-seo friendly URL's (/product?p=1738 etc) and we're looking at deploying SEO friendly url's such as (/product/this-is-product-one) etc. As you could imagine, making such a change on a big ecomms site will be a difficult task and we will have to take on A LOT of content changes, href-lang changes, affiliate link tests and a big 301 task. I'm trying to get some analysis together to pitch the Tech guys, but it's difficult, I do understand that this change has it's benefits for SEO, usability and CTR - but I need some more info. Keywords in the slugs - what is it's actual SEO weight? Has anyone here recently converted from using parameter based URL's to keyword-based slugs and seen results? Also, what are the best ways of deploying this? Add a canonical and 301? All comments greatly appreciated! Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
How Best To Accommodate A Site's Changing Subject Matter?
Hi, I'm dealing with a several year old site that has had a lot of success in organic search around one particular subject and is now evolving into other subjects. Would like your experience on how best to handle this. Here's what we have so far: First, the site was about niche craft carpentry. Then, it added training. Then, it added training in other subjects in smatterings, like plumbing, electrical, etc. Now it's considering adding training in subjects even further from niche craft carpentry. So, interior decorator training, landscaping training, etc. Nearly all of it's organic search traffic (about 200,00 per month) comes from blogs, articles and discussions related to the original topic of niche craft carpentry... not training. As we've branched out from carpentry into carpentry training and then other subject training, have not had great success in organic with these new less related topics. We've had some for carpentry training type terms, but not much else. If the site owners are hell bent on expanding into these other training subjects for business reasons other than search, how would you structure it? For instance, would you go originalsitename.com/landscaping or landscaping.OriginalSiteName.com or what? I understand that a landscaping.originalsitename.com is for all intents and purposes a new domain name and won't have the authority of the original. However, would it have more chance of breaking free of how Google has pigeon-holed the original site's subject matter as niche carpentry-relevant only? Or, would you just keep adding subjects to the original domain name and figure that one of these days google is going to see it as the Lynda.com of an expanding galaxy of home improvement? I should add that the future of the site is training, so landscape training or interior design training is pretty far from high end niche carpentry stuff. What do you think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Bing/Yahoo! Updates
On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion). For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords. The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article). Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BedeFahey0 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0