Hi there,
As you know, a major factor of Google's search algorithm is link
popularity. Here are some facts and assumptions that will help you
better understand your situation.
Updates
-------
Although it has been a bit erratic in the last year, things have
settled down a bit, and Google has returned to updating its index
roughly once a month. The following cycle reflects how long it takes
for a new link or content to show up in search results (the dates are
made up, as an example only):
Less than one month to appear:
May 1 - Google updates index
May 1 - May 28 - Googlebot crawls the web and records what it finds
May 6 - Site A links to your site
May 12 - GoogleBot visits Site A
May 30 - Google updates their index with the new information from
GoogleBot, including the new link to your site
More than one month to appear:
May 1 - Google updates index
May 1 - May 28 - Googlebot crawls the web and records what it finds
May 6 - GoogleBot visits Site A
May 12 - Site A links to your site
May 30 - Google updates their index with the new information from GoogleBot
June 1 - June 28 - Googlebot crawls the web and records what it finds
June 11 - GoogleBot visits Site A, and sees the link to your site
June 30 - Google updates their index with the new information from
GoogleBot, including the new link to your site
So, if a site links to yours today, the link will affect the search
results in either the next index update, or the one after. The next
one is likely to be about three weeks away, but no-one except Google
search engineers know for sure (and even they may not have decided on
a date yet).
Previous updates are listed here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2657.htm
(It is missing the last two, roughly 1 week and 5 weeks ago.)
Backward Links
--------------
Many webmasters make use of the "Backward Links" function of the
Google Toolbar. Many do not realise that, despite what Google help
pages say, it does not list every link pointing to a page. The
consensus of webmaster opinion in various forums says that in general
only pages with a PageRank of 4 or more are listed. Nobody knows for
sure if this means only these pages affect link popularity, or if
every link counts.
Here are some threads on the topic at WebMasterWorld:
"I've learnt that google only shows backward links that has pr4 or
higher. link:mysite.com will only show sites that links to u which
have a pr4 or higher. But then google still count the pr4 and under
sites in your true page rank, it just doesn;t show it. (so I've
heard)"
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4187.htm
"link:www.domain.com will bring up all sites where the link page is
>pr4. Lower PR links do count for your site but are not listed using
this search term."
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/7825.htm
"google doesn't include pages with less than about pr4 in a "link:"
search, but it does use those pages when calculating PageRank (so you
do benefit from being linked by them)"
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4641-2-15.htm
"PLEASE NOTE: Only backlinks of pr4 and above show with the link:
command. Thus, if you have 100 PR3 pages linking to a page, and 4 that
are pr4+, you'll only see 4 backlinks."
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/6589.htm
You may also find that the Backward Link feature shows different
results depending on which URL you give it:
mysite.com
www.mysite.com
mysite.com/index.html
www.mysite.com/index.html
Has the link been indexed?
--------------------------
Go to a page that links to yours, and using the Google Toolbar, select
Page Info / Cached Snapshot of Page.
If the cached version of the page has the link, Google has it in its index.
Google Toolbar
http://toolbar.google.com/
Tip
---
Every time another site links to yours, submit their URL to Google, to
make sure that Google knows about it.
Submit URL
://www.google.com/addurl.html
Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga |
