How Long For Links To Take Effect?

[SeattleCPA]

Say, I have a question, which I thought I knew the answer to... but which as time goes by, I just scratch my head more and more... Simply stated, as of summer 2007, is there a consensus as to how long search engines take to recognize and reward links.

BTW, totally willing to make a fool of myself, I would have answered this question myself by saying something like, "Well, as I understand it, Google reportedly updates for backlinks continuously... so it should happen pretty quickly. Remember, though, that it may be a while before Google re-visits the site that's added the links... so, oh shoot, I don't know, say as a wild guess, a few weeks."

Recently, though, I've started to wonder if it isn't all slightly more complicated than this. E.g., maybe it's like that great book, "Logic of Failure" where there's also a time delay on the thermostat...

Anybody want to share a comment on this?

[torka]

I don't think there's any one standard answer. How quickly they will notice the link depends on how often they spider the page the link is on, which can be a highly variable number depending on their perceived "importance" of the page and how often, generally speaking, the page changes.

How quickly the link, once noticed, will start to count in your favor could range from "nearly immediately" to "never." Google has never claimed they allow every link to pass PR, and their criteria for which are allowed to pass along the love and which are not are a closely-guarded business secret.

My

--Torka

[SeattleCPA]

Originally Posted by torka

How quickly they will notice the link depends on how often they spider the page the link is on, which can be a highly variable number depending on their perceived "importance" of the page and how often, generally speaking, the page changes.

Yeah, that makes sense. A link can't "count" until the search engine revisits the page and sees the link for the first time.

As to your other points, that not all links "share the love"... that's an interesting observation/hypothesis/whatever. I find it very believable.

Thank you Torka.

BTW, this makes me share something else I sort of think I'd do were I a search engine... I think I'd count the first link more than the hundredth link. I.e., I think I'd apply a diminishing marginal utilty weighting factor or something.

Using this line of thought, I'd see a 100 links from a 100 different web sites as much weightier or whatever than 100 links from the same web site. Note that I'm assuming everything else is absolutely equal.

[pete]

Hours, days, weeks, eternity.....

Get the links on popular forums, such as this, craigs list, etc. as those are spidered several times a day, at least.

Put them on one of my sites and never hear from them again...sigh.

[SeattleCPA]

Originally Posted by pete

Get the links on popular forums, such as this, craigs list, etc. as those are spidered several times a day, at least.

It appears to me that how often the spiders visit a site largely depends on how often the site's content is updated.

E.g., I believe that I've seen evidence of this with my sites at both ends of spectrum... Infrequent updates mean infrequent spider visits. Frequent updates mean frequent spider visits.

It's as if when the spider visits it says, "Well, shoot, little or nothing has changed since the last time we visited... we wait a bit longer next time before we revisit..."

[Debra]

It appears to me that how often the spiders visit a site largely depends on how often the site's content is updated.

My main site, Alliance-Link.com has toolbar PageRank of 5, about 8 total pages to it and hasn't been updated in over a year and yet, I'm crawled almost every day according to my independent stat program and Google's WMTools.

I think it's less about content changing than it is about inbound links being followed.

is there a consensus as to how long search engines take to recognize and reward links.

I don't think there is or at least, I've never seen one. My short answer would be, less time for those with more and higher PageRank pages linking to them than those with less and lower PageRank pages pointing to them AND

It depends on how competitive the terms were. Would it take more to pop "online gambling" versus "picnic tables"? I'd say so!

[east2west]

Originally Posted by Debra

My main site, Alliance-Link.com has toolbar PageRank of 5, about 8 total pages to it and hasn't been updated in over a year and yet, I'm crawled almost every day according to my independent stat program and Google's WMTools.

I think it's less about content changing than it is about inbound links being followed.



I don't think there is or at least, I've never seen one. My short answer would be, less time for those with more and higher PageRank pages linking to them than those with less and lower PageRank pages pointing to them AND

It depends on how competitive the terms were. Would it take more to pop "online gambling" versus "picnic tables"? I'd say so!

Good post here!

[SeattleCPA]

Thanks Debra. Good stuff in your comments. Very useful.

[andyf]

I agree with you all....It all depend on the speed of indexing and updating backlink database by Google. IMO high PR and fast updating sites have spiders more often on their site to see the change and index it accordingly.
So it is better to have a link from high PR site and with high traffic.

[Logan]

To clear up things regarding PageRank, all of the opinions regarding googlebot factoring in a page's pagerank to determine the activity of visits - this is my understanding as well.

While Google's PageRank is a formula often discussed in relation to the algorithm and a page's ranking, Google also uses PageRank for other things - including googlebot's spidering. I heard this at an SES conference a few years ago (from a non-cutts google engineer). Think of it as if the frequency of visits starts at 10 and works its way down. Remember pagerank ~ importance. Part of the benefit of a higher PageRank is more frequent spidering. Froogle also use(d) pagerank ... and other things google does as well - i suppose. So while pagerank itself isn't as important as before, and many don't think it is a good barometer to consider regarding ranking ... pagerank itself impacts more than a site's ranking with google ... googlebot activity specifically... and kind of fundamental to google. Since other search engines/spiders also work in a similar manner regarding following links and spidering, you can also anticipate it to work roughly in the same way with them.