My site just made a HUGE jump for my target keyword after inching up for a while, but given I've been doing both getting backlinks and doing some recent page tweaks, I'm not sure which would have done the job. What's generally a reasonable time to expect site changes to affect your rankings? Does it happen as soon as Google & the rest see the changed pages, or sometime after? Same question for backlinks - how long does it take Google & the rest to find them typically and does any ranking benefit from them happen right when they do or sometime after?
Depending on backlink source it usually needs a few weeks and they achieve their full value after 3 - 6 month. On page changes depend on crawl frequency and competition. Usually you can see changes after a few hours - some days.
It takes some time to spider to check all your back links on other site, so probably it takes some time and to change your on page part you can change it any time, Google will check when your site get cached.
I depends on how often they crawl your site to see the changes you've made and how often they crawl each of the other sites where the new links are to discover the new links.
Ah wow - didn't realize backlink value could take that long. My site's a blog that I post on each weekday, so site changes I'm sure wouldn't take too long. That said, I guess my jump could be due to either as I added a footer link w keyword anchor text to the home page which wasn't there before and it was about a couple weeks ago when I initially submitted to a slew of blog directories, most of which accepted pretty quickly.