It takes so long for the search engines that matter to re-index and recognise any changes in your sites. MSN is about the quickest and Google... well, if you're prepared to wait, you're looking at several months before your ranking gets changed or you see any major changes in how it views your site.

I've got inbound links from recognised and higher PR sites. I have Google sitemaps. My sites are accessbile, relevant and follow useability guidelines...

Is this lag a ploy to make you spend more on PPC?

If, like me, you have relevant sites but not a lot of traffic, is there a way to speed this process up?

Strangely I have a site that doesn't really have anything happening with it but already has a PR of 5 (not that it means anything, but it feels good).

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Fort me PR means absolutely NIL! I have even uninstalled the Google Toolbar from IE because I found myself looking up at the PR on every page I visited. In reality PR seems to mean very little in SERPS.

Now I have Google toolbar just on Firefox which is my secondary browser along with Opera.

Google is definately slower, MSN is faaaast and Yahoo I am not sure but somewhere in between? Perhaps Google has to do more analysis before it can come up with a result?

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Jabbs
"The More I Know, The Less I Seem To Know!"
Anything IT & Support Forums

I've been noticing (looking in our logs) that the Google bot has really slowed down in visiting our site. We haven't changed much, a page here and there... but compared to the last year, way down.

I also noticed on Google SERPs that the date (next to our listing) has not shown up for a while. Last year, I could update, check back in two or three days and see the changes plus a date next to the listing (when it was last updated).

Not sure why its dropped off. But, in short, yes, we have seen quite a delay, more so in the last few months.

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Living the life in the Idaho Falls and playing Disc Golf
Idaho Falls SEO

Yes it has been painfully slow. What Google and all the others taught me was to use direct email and then drive prospects to the site :-) While I wait.

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Gary
www.pilotjourney.com

MSN is SICK fast. (within 5 days)

I made changes to 2 seperate sites last thursday (May 25). Put brand new metas on all pages and updated content. MSN updated all of them including the new metas as of today, May 30th.

I'm already well ranked for some competitive keyphrases

Yahoo is 2nd. They updated half.

Google is soooooo slow. Content updates happen within a 2 weeks, but metas, forget about it, MONTHS!!!

With the BIG G it also depends on how often you update you content. If you do it often they'll know and look for changes often.

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Schmeetz
Health Forum Canada

Regarding an answer to the ploy issue. I believe Google has no choice but to add PPC into their strategy. Personally I find MSN more accurate anyway, and the fact that I use email and direct marketing as well, drives more traffic to my site than google does so far.

Is this in reference to your site or a clients site anyway?

[quote="Jabber_uk"]For me PR means absolutely NIL!

Why does everyone feel PR is not important?? Of course it is not the end all like once thought BUT it is very Imporant. The website from the original poster is: http://www.medtrials.co.uk which has a PR of '0'. IMO this has to be a factor. The only thing that signficanly supercedes PR in Google results is anchor text. Good Anchor text + good PR (4+) = great results. PR is important.

Our website has a PR of 6 and is updated on Google SERP's within 2-4 days. Whenever we have a new update I go to http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and the Google SERPs are updated very quickly. I don't know if this is because of our decent PR, the google submit function or both. Just my experience.

No date? Really? I hadn't seen that occuring at all. I just tried one of our tougher search phrases (300M results, we're currently #4) and saw May 28th next to it. I guess 2 days ago isn't bad for a cache date either.

It seems that PR is important for crawling purposes, which means "Nil" isn't the right term any more. For ranking, it doesn't mean so much, but it seems that for frequent crawling it does.

Brian

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I feel your (our) pain.

I'm boycotting google for my own searches. If there is anything I've learned from this experience it is that new, potentially really good sites, won't even show up in searches.

Never mind PR. My site - Scribi.com - has had only the top page indexed for close to a year, now, and I've jumped through all of the same hoops. MSN and Yahoo have me very well indexed, indeed, and I can work on PR for those. But Google is dead in the water, for me.

So, call me the "anti-google".

rickb

Yes of course it is. Google is making no profits at all so they need to trick everybody into using adwords,... :D

Don't worry, it has nothing to do with PPC.

This is where your problem is.. relevant sites? What on earth is a relevant site? If you can figure out the answer to this one, you´re on your way to higher rankings.

Relevant sites don't get you high rankings. You have relevant sites,... and so do a zillion other people. What makes your site so much more relevant than theirs?

That´s good, but my first question would be: what does it say in the anchor texts? Probably a big part of your problem lays there.

The worsed thing you can do is think you have a relevant website. It makes you lazy. Don't look at relevance,... look at perceived relevance (which is dominated by links and all the link factors you can think of.)

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Otimização de Sites (SEO in Brazil)

Well, for an interesting read on stats for a brand new site - here goes. I have one page on a well established site that has produced 19 hits. This page ranks top ten in google for 'any place in london' + public houses. In second place, are 6 links from (wait for it) - - yes, it's webproworld; plus a few from others of my sites.
Since posting the url to google and msn late last night, I have 111 google visits, and 123 from yahoo, plus a 1000 from Google adsense, and 18000 from my own search engine at freefind.
This is for an approx 5,000 page site of useful content on PubsinLondon; and I am number 5 in Yahoo already for this simple search of pubsinlondon, and number one at my established site - not that anyone will ever search for this - but that is pretty quick.
Site
pubsinlondon.net
Keep up the good work Mr Webproworld,
Kevan

Yes and this is what many mistakeningly think is a sandbox... when in reality it is a quality check. Link abuse and also Google wish to not crash the server when it hammers away... amount to a needed delay for all sites to be crawled and indexed.

Due to the Google index doubling in size and therefore the amount of available PR also increased making the old PR4 the new PR5.

As for the idea that the delay is to make you spend more in PPC.....what if you weren't spending money in Adword but Yahoo SEM... what would you then place the lag on???

Is there a way to speed up the process,,,yes add traffic...

proof?? one need only look at most recent tragedies and how traffic to the red cross and other relied/aid websites... spikes..to see that Google is paying attention to traffic levels in determining results to display.

fctoma wrote
From Matt Cutts Blog:

You can read it here

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/

It may be your linking issues..I am not sure

================================================== =

I've noticed a few others who also look to blame Google on issues they are having, unfortunately suffice it to say there is little doubt it is Googles issue...

You may think you know everything there in regards to SEO, crawling and indexing (two seperate issues) of your website.

There is little chance you know enough about it in fact to make assumptions that a large company with millions of customers... is out to destroy your website single handedly...

Here is a good test to see if you know the SEO, indexing & crawling of your site enough to offer a sound conspiracy theory.

Grab a pen and piece of paper.

Write down in one or two numbered sentences each piece of SEO information you know.

For example

1. Use <title> tag on every page.
2. Use <meta description> tag on every page
3. Offer a site map
4. Use a google sitemap
5. Validate code as close to spec as can be
6. Remove all javascript from webpage/ use external file with single call'
7. alt image text
8. keyword density
9. keyword weight
10. site theme
etc
etc

do this for as many issues as you know, what we are trying to do is solve the Google algorithim.

There are over 100 parts to the algorithim that we are told...so if you can list 70 items of importance then you may have an idea that your site is correct...

less than that and you need to check things further before placing conspiracy theories or blame on the search engine.

My two centavos

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Here is another reason the original poster may have issues.

http://www.ticketbin.co.uk/

is linked to

http://www.medtrials.co.uk/

in Googles eyes this is not copacetic so to speak...things don't match....

I would think if you unlink your sites (including the job and design and any others) and you should see some improvement after some time.

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Yup.
Yup.
An html site map? Ok, haven't done that.
Done.
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
As much as practical, on the content-specific pages. Some are better than others.
How do I control that? Are you referring to keywords in the title concurring with keywords in the meta concurring with keywords in the content?

If so: same answer as above.
Not sure what you mean by that - there is certainly a theme to the site.
Like adding RSS feeds? Done.

Like simplifying dynamic urls and making them look static via mod_rewrites?

Oh, yeah, spent a few weeks down that path.

The result of all this work is that my site still isn't indexed, except for the home page on Google.

MSN and Yahoo (and a couple of others) have indexed me very well.

So, I'm still the 'anti-google'.

rickb

How many relevant links are enough? Is there still any value with one way links?

thanks

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Printer, fax and copier toner | Key Toner Sites | Sensible eating

One-way, on-topic links have value. Off-topic or reciprocal links have lesser values, but we don't know what the factors are in determining relevance totally yet. Matt Cutts seemed to imply that reciprocal links are pretty much discounted and that off-topic links have no value whatsoever. I don't think they're quite to that point, but he may be seeing the path they're travelling and putting a bit of a warning out there for poeple to start getting everything in order if you're not already seeing problems.

Quantity will vary by industry. In smaller, niche categories 10 may be enough. If you're selling [insert pharmaceutical here], 10,000 may not be enough. Look at your top competitors to see what you'll likely need (using Yahoo Site Explorer or MSN, of course).

Brian.

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ToolBarn.com, an Internet Retailer Top 500 and Inc. 500 Company | Tool Parts | Pet Supplies

click the cache button to see the date that google last grabbed a look at your site / page.

I don't have too much trouble getting sites in google fairly quickly. Take a look at that article by Matt Cutts. The quickest way is to get some links from relevant sites that rank well in that category.

Also when it comes to the google sitemap, when you make some changes try adding an additional page to your site so that your site map changes, then redo and update your google sitemap. no clue if that's a good one, it's just something I've started doing in the last 6months when we add a page to a site we update the sitemap for that site too.

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Ron Boyd
Web design & site management :: Ron's blog

Rick have you used Google Sitemaps? When I use it, Google crawls my whole site. The result is my whole site is in Google.

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賃貸 大阪 | Alaris

Great post.

Could I suggest you have the recursive sitemap implementation installed if on a nix box.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sit...generator.html

Look under #6 for recurring script. Should make your life a little easier and pick up a few more minutes with your family each day...

Peace

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