One SEO professional asked John Mueller about how Google would process content changes.
They asked: when adding content to a site, can they expect to see results fast?
Or, do they need to wait for an update to see the full effects of the content changes?
John answered that there is no artificial timing on Google’s side regarding making changes on your site.
Google does not artificially hold things back for a specific period of time or a specific update. It’s really all about when Google can crawl and reprocess the page, they will try and reflect this in the search results as quickly as possible.
If you change the text on a page, then usually as soon as they can recrawl it, the text should be findable in search. And, if you search for that, specifically, it should come up. And this can be after several seconds after making that change, especially if they can recrawl the change really quickly.
Sometimes they crawl pages a bit slower in that maybe it takes a few weeks or a few months for them to recrawl the individual page.
And this is kind of the timeline that one would have in a case like this. This kind of crawl rate depends on the website and on the specific pages themselves.
It can also happen that they crawl the homepage very quickly and maybe one of the articles or product pages is crawled a bit slower.
This happens at approximately the 38:46 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 38:46
When adding content to a site, could we expect to see results pretty quickly? Or would we need to wait for an update to see the full effects?
John (Answer) 38:54
So there’s no artificial timing on our side with regards to making changes on our website. So it’s not that we artificially hold things back for a specific period of time or a specific update.
It’s really when we can recrawl and reprocess the page, we’ll try to reflect that in the search results as quickly as possible. So if you change a text on a page, then usually as soon as we can recrawl that, that text can be findable in search. And if you search for that, specifically, it should come up.
And that can be after several seconds after making that change, If we can pick it up really quickly. Sometimes we crawl pages a little bit slower in that maybe it takes a few weeks or a few months for us to recrawl that individual page.
And that’s kind of the timeline that you would have in a case like that. And this kind of crawl rate depends on the website and on the specific pages themselves. So it can happen that the homepage we crawl very quickly and maybe one of the articles or product pages is crawled a bit slower.
