This was an interesting question in today’s hangout, specifically dealing with how Google processed algos to determine ranking.

Lets say that I improve quality of my site overall and users do notice that. How often does Google recalculate the overall score for my website? Every week, 2 weeks, monthly or does it take more time like 3 months for example?

While it is common knowledge that some parts of the algo is virtually real time while others wait for a push from Google’s end, John Mueller describes exactly how this works.

It’s really hard to say because some algorithms at Google are updated essentially in real time as we get more information, others are updated more in batches and sometimes these kind of play in together.  So its not something where I would say there would ever be a fixed time frame we would give out for any specific algorithm because that can also change over time.   And sometimes that’s kind of an interplay with multiple parts of different algorithms.

So for example, if you change something on your website, we might be able to process that  in real time, but that is based on when we actually crawl those pages and reindexes those pages.  So the algorithm  reacts in real time but it might take maybe half a year for us to actually crawl those pages so that we can react.

So because of all these kind of interplaying factors, it’s really hard to give any kind of timeline for any specific change.

So experienced SEOs can have a pretty good guess at what parts are pushed out in batches (such as Panda) and which ones are real time (such as some on-page SEO factors).  But not everyone might think about the interplaying aspect of both real time algos and ones that are pushed out in batches.

He also brings up the issue of the wait for a page or site to be recrawled as also affecting the timeline to see changes in the search results.  While 6 months would be on the extreme side, such as a site that hasn’t had a single update in 6 years suddenly getting an SEO makeover, most sites would the recrawl happen much sooner than that, but with a delay of perhaps a week or two depending on the site and the page.