After several weeks of trying to optimize our site, it finally dawned on us the importance of back links. So we went back to the drawing board and made sure our internal link structure is optimized with key phrases in anchor text. We have also begun an external link strategy. We are using a coupe of the popular online tools (McDar and Digital Point Solutions) to check the status of the back links, but have not seen anything in the last 3 weeks. I know it takes time to crawl through sites, but thought we would see at least one link reported by now. Does anyone know when and how often Google updates back link statistics. I would certainly appreciate any help.
Internally they are updated sooner than what you see public (with the "link:" function. Usually about every 2-4 weeks for the public side.
You will not see any backlinks publicly under the toolbar, although they are counted internally, until about 2 updates (6-8 weeks).
If you are in Y try domainlink:mydomain.com Presently I see Y being faster to include than G and they seem to show more or less all BL's where what G shows at present is anyones guess as it seems no longer being entirely based on pr4... M
According to Matt Cutts of Google link benefit is acheived as soon as the anchor page is added to the google index (a few days after being spidered) full benefit can take a few updates, as page rank is related to ecvery other page in the index *6-8 weeks
Expat and me are currently betting on when the next update will be. How sad... Sorry haven't replied to your message yet expat.. I've just had a move from Ireland to Scotland.
As we are on the subject of back links, I will like to ask if updating of backlinks is done more often or updating of new pages, or are they done simultaneously. Sometimes my new pages are added almost in 2-3 days, while st it takes weeks. R.Anand
In general 'public' backlink updates take longer than the time taken to index a new page. This does depend on how often your site is spidered by Google. Generally speaking on most of my sites Google trawls everyday and picks up all new pages within two days (unless buried very deeply in directories!). Public backlink updates generally take place every 18 - 20 days although there are no guarantees. As Shawn and others have mentioned on other threads Google takes account of the impact of new pages and backlinks before they become publicly visible. Mick
Mick, I have been doing a great deal of experimenting with Google in the past 3 months, and I'm not sure that it takes account of backlinks before they become publicly visible. Several pages have held the same position on key phrases despite a significant increase in number of internal and external backlinks with key phrases in the anchor text. When compared to other listing that are well ahead of us, we have them beaten by nearly all optimization statistics except backlinks. In fact the only reason some of these sites hold page 1 listing is due primarily to backlinks despite having violated every optimization technique.
MyEclipse, sorry but you are mistaken. We all see minor SERP movement most of the time, but when everyone gets excited is when Gbot does a deep crawl and starts the SERPs climbing high and diving low. Usually that is the internal update for BL/PR. We then wait for a couple of days for the public display of what G was doing internally.