John explained in a tweet that Google takes time to pick up and process quality changes for search.
@NFG946 wrote the following in a tweet:
Ok, John, so as you said earlier post unique content. I have removed today 30 plus no value content post. So now can I expect some good news? Because the big question is that I have lots of unique content that no body have earlier, rather than google still not index them.
John answered:
Making significant quality changes across a site takes time to be picked up and reflected in search. These things often take several months to be reprocessed & reevaluated.
This is Nothing New
Nope, what John Mueller is saying is not new. In fact, he has said the same thing before, over in a hangout on May 1, 2018. You can view his hangout here.
If your site is a large site, and you have employed brand-new changes, then it’s likely that Google will take several months to assess how your site is now compared to how it was then.
One example of these types of changes are 301 redirects. If you make a change to how these URLs function, then Google has to understand all of the brand-new 301s. This is a process that occurs slowly and rankings do not drop quickly—and especially not overnight.
However if you have done something incorrectly, it’s likely that you will see your traffic progressively drop off over time.
The other side of the coin is that you could see a pretty quick drop-off in traffic, especially if Google decides on a particular day that it doesn’t like your site as much as it once did.
Algorithms don’t affect a site overnight, and in fact can take time, depending on the nature of the roll out of said algorithm.
The transcript from that hangout is as follows:
So that’s something where I wouldn’t expect to see fast changes.
It’s more a matter of several months over which it takes for us to recrawl, re-index, reprocess the website to understand how it has changed, how we need to change how we show it in the search results.
So if you made changes on one day and like a week later you start seeing changes in the search results, that was also a date that other people mentioned as kind of bigger changes that they were seeing, then probably that’s not related to the changes that you made.
Usually you’d really have like this multi-month period of things kind of subtly changing over time rather than like this one big change.
So I should just leave things as they are right now let it kind of settle out for a few weeks and then or a few months and then see what happens moving forward and then start trying to address potential issues?
Yeah, I’m always conscious about this saying like you should just leave it for a couple of months because that sounds like oh I’m never gonna change anything again until it figures out where it wants to show my website. And you always need to be on top of things anyway. So there’s always a certain amount of things that you’ll be working on anyway. So I kind of shy away from saying I’m not going to touch anything until I don’t know June or July.”
As Usual, It’s Important to Exercise Caution
When assessing whether or not specific changes have affected your site, it’s important to exercise caution when doing so.
Don’t always jump to the conclusion that an immediate drop was due to a technical change, or other content changes made yesterday.
It could be that changes made 2 months ago were the culprit behind certain traffic changes.
This is why you must always keep tabs on what’s going on on your website, both on the frontend and the backend.
Only you, the webmaster, will be able to assess exactly what went wrong and when by working to keep tabs on these types of changes.
