How long after making changes will position on Google be altered?

[celife]

I'm curious as to how long Google updates take these days?  I'm just getting back into SEO after 9 years and I recall back in the day there was a monthly "dance" during which page results were updated.  Is it more frequent now?  Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

This can vary depending on how often Google crawls your site, but I've seen Google crawl and update the rankings in just a few days on some moderately popular sites.  I've heard the most popular sites, like the NY Times, are being crawled and updated many times a day.  For some really low traffic websites I've seen it take maybe 10 days, but never longer than two weeks, which is just my personal experience of course.

You can go into Google Webmaster Tools to see how often they crawl and how many pages deep they usually go.  If the content you're trying to get updated is deep into your site it could take longer.  But the homepage much quicker.

Hope this helps.

-Dan

[oznappies]

Submitting a current sitemap and help the process, at least to get the ball rolling. We tend to see a spike in crawl rate after doing this.

[celife]

That makes sense that it varies based on the size of the site.  I'm dealing with page rank 3 and 4 sites (moderate to small)...so I'm guessing I'm seeing up to two weeks.  Regarding the crawl indication at webmaster tools, if I see a crawl there can I assume the actual pages at google have been updated shortly thereafter?  I haven't equated the crawl and the viewable results as the same but maybe I should?

[celife]

Thanks, I started using sitemap.xml pages about a year ago on my sites and am also a believer in this process

[Getz.pro]

I agree it depends with the crawl rate on the site.Updating a new sitemap helps if you are adding new URLs and posting new content on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs gets the attention of Google, so if it seems to be going slow, try getting social.

I think this question is already answered, unless you need more clarity?