A Google SEO Test…. well observation. Just an idea that was in my drafts I had to document the anatomy of Google’s indexing processes. In this test I am just observing and recording what seems to happen, and what you might be able to expect when publishing content. I know generally what to expect but it’s always good to have a peak so I will check back every now and again till I got the data. I use WordPress, RSS & Feedburner (pinging Google Blogsearch) to instantly syndicate the Hobo articles so I expect a few things to happen:
- Get into Google serps in a few minutes
- Dissappear for a while again
- Come back into the serps & stabalise
- Get Cached by Google
- Rank
So how long did it take to index my new page when I pressed publish, and what happened to the page in SERPS:
- My Feedreader (instantly – though there can be a delay sometimes)
- Google Blog Search (15 minutes)
- Google SERPS (30 minutes – so Google knows about it)
- 1 hour UK position 25
- 12 Hours later top 10 UK
- Cache accessible within @18 hours, I can access it use using the info:command, but the cache is not available in the SERPS yet
- A few days later Google dropped it from the SERPS as expected. Today it seems to be back on page 2 of Google.
- During this period the page is not even returned in a site: command but it is using the page info:command.
This is all down to the way Google handles fresh up-to-date content – see QDF Query Deserves Freshness. If you get a handle on it, you see why online business authority and being first with the news is KEY to getting traffic out of Google. I’ve got 12,000 visits from Google alone in just over 24 hours fiddling with that – but you’ve got to be fast out of the traps.
So I would expect rankings to stabalise, and those rankings will depend a lot on the authority of this site, the relevance of my page title, the content and over time, how well linked it is within this site (which a lot of people forget about) as I don’t really expect too many incoming links to the page. Of course, rankings will depend on how well ‘optimised’ the competition is for the term.
Interesting Note - Google seems to have little issue with my blog and this is fairly common interaction. However when I fiddled about with how many posts my Feed published (ie increased from 50 to 300), I seemed to run into probs with Feedburner picking up my posts. Wonder if this slows things down somewhat? As soon as I set it back to 50 and edited the post, bang, the articles picked up immediately, as usual.
Note See here for more Geek stuff on QDF.
