Hi, At the moment I am using awstats to track stats and I can see that googlebot is hitting my site once or twice a day. My question is do I have to wait a while for Google to do this so called update (few weeks or so) before I will be placed correctly in the search engine? I mean if you go to yahoo or msn and search rap ringtones, I am 4th and 2nd respectively but non existent for this search term in Google, which seems a little odd to me. Any advice on this one guys?
Don't waste your time waiting. You can't do anything to speed this up. Just work on incoming links/more sites/content etc.
Good advice nohaber, however it *should* be with a week or two. That is unless G decided to skip this one.
Is it a new site? If so you'll be waiting alot longer then a couple weeks. Sure you'll get a pr and all your pages will show up in the search engine but you'll be waiting anywhere from 2-6 months to start showing up in the results. If it's a new sitre your better off spending time on ranking well in yahoo and other search engines. Google hates new sites and put short term penalties on them.
Ok lets try and correct some of the thing that were said in the last post, and assumed in your original question. 1. The PR/backlink update has little or nothing to do with your SERP placement. Google gives you whatever credit they are going to give you for the links as soon as they find them and index the pages that they are on. You can see this by doing an Allinanchor: search. The PR/BL update is really just a matter of housekeeping and reporting. 2. Google is currently doing some very wierd things. All kinds of sites have fallen in the SERPs, or lost backlinks, or both. And there doesn't appear to be any really consistent pattern. I personally think there is a glitch in their system -- it has happened before -- and that it will probably be straightened out in another few weeks. They may even delay the next PR/BL update until they get it sorted out. 3. There definitely seems to be something called the sandbox effect with Google. I personally don't think it has anything to do with new sites as such, but rather has to do with new links. It seem that it takes up to approximately 3 months before Google gives new links their full value as far as SERP placement goes. Google knows they are there. You can see them in allinanchor: and in PR once the updates are run, but you won't see their effect on SERP placement for a lot longer. So keep working and be patient.
The last update was very-very strange! I haven't got any new links in my backlinks report! It seems Google don't report new backlinks while they are in sandbox. I got 3 sites (PR7, PR6, PR5) on my thematic with my HTML blocks ROS (run of site). I got good traffic from them but I have no backlinks from them because they were very new to last update but still they were already chached and known by Google to update time. It never happened before
My site has been around for about three years, although for about 8 months it simply had a holding page explaining site was being redeveloped...getting good ranks in yahoo, msn, ask and others so will concentrate on that for now although Google is obviously what I want
Thanks compar (and others), there are some good points which clear up a few questions that I had...I think for now I'll just keep building links and eventually I'll get a good SERP in Google no doubt...at the moment I'm a weak PR2 but I'll definitely improve this over the summer