People who manage websites frequently believe that SEO has a simple progression from Google crawling to adjusting page rankings. However, this is actually not the case, and it can take a long time before your page ranking improves. A website page of your best web hosting site for WordPress could be crawled today, but you wouldn’t see anything change in the page rankings for days, weeks, or even months.
The lag between crawling and page ranking changes raises many questions for web hosting with Node.js support owners. They often question, “What happens between Google discovering my new content and the time my page ranking is adjusted?”
Multiple evaluations take place between Google crawling your page and formally updating the ranking in Google search results. Google doesn’t automatically rank your page just because it crawled it earlier. Google crawls a page to gather information and evaluate if it fits into the rankings competition.
Understanding how information and results are evaluated for a better SEO adjustment can help you understand why SEO results vary and how Google changes your web page rankings.
Crawling process
When Google crawls a web page, it is initially collecting and using data from that web page. During the process of Googlebot visiting, downloading, and analyzing the contents of your web page, it identifies the key difference from the time it last crawled. This doesn’t define a new ranking of the web page. Crawling only informs Google about what’s new and updated on your web page at the current moment.
To illustrate, you can write new content or refresh your existing page by adding relevant or additional information or modifying the metadata for your page title, description, or image. Google will identify these changes through crawling, but it will not know how these changes impact until it evaluates them.
Google treats web page crawling as a means of information gathering.
Processing your content
Once Google has retrieved the current webpage content, it begins to process it and determine its actual purpose.
Google considers various factors: age structure, the relevance of a subject matter, keywords used, the context of the content on that page, any media within that page (i.e., images, videos, etc.), any internal link, and the overall quality of the content. These factors altogether let Google decide your webpage’s ranking. Additionally, it will consider different search queries that the web page returns.
Search engines have moved away from relying solely on “keyword matching.” Modern systems evaluate meaning, context, and relationships between concepts. Thus, Google first establishes confidence in the web page before deciding its ranking.
Web page re-indexed
Along with understanding your webpage and how it relates to its index, Google may also change its index of the page. The index is essentially a giant database that includes information about the pages found online and how those pages pertain to particular themes or subjects.
If there has been a major change to a page that had previously been indexed, it could be replaced with the most current version. However, the time between indexings depends on a variety of factors, including the website’s authority, frequency of Google crawling, and how significant the changes were.
Once a page is crawled but not fully re-indexed, its previous behaviors continue until Google’s understanding of the page is updated.
Comparison against other competitor pages
Once Google knows about a page, it looks at how it stacks up to other competitor pages to determine its rank. Remember sometimes even with key content improvements, competing websites can get more ranking because they may continue to provide more value than your newly improved content on the other page.
By Google’s algorithms, ranking changes happen only when the newly created content exhibits competitive value against the other websites providing similar content.
User behavior signals
Google continuously serves results helpful for users. Although there is still some disagreement on engagement signals affecting ranking, there is evidence that user behavior can provide insight on how well a web page is relevant for search queries.
If users respond positively with content, spend time engaging with it, and find answers without returning immediately to search results, then it’s your webpage’s usefulness.
On the other hand, if users abandon a page within moments of landing on it and continue to search for different content, Google interprets it as an indication that the content is not fully satisfying the users’ intent.
This results in a longer ranking change for the given web page.
Build algorithmic confidence
Google’s systems often take some time to build confidence in a page. The changes in the SERPs do not take effect right away.
A page that has just been updated may initially receive a limited amount of visibility for relevant search queries. In this instance, it allows Google to obtain more data about the page’s performance, relevance, and user satisfaction.
Once Google determines that the page is delivering value to users, the page’s ranking gradually improves. However, if the web page does not meet the user’s expectations, visibility either remains unchanged or declines.
Summary
Google crawlers and rankings involve much more than simply searching for content on the web. After crawling a page, Google has to process it, update its database, check the relevancy of the content, compare it with other similar pages, and build confidence in that page. All these factors help your web page get an ideal ranking position in search results.
For website owners, the bottom line is patience. Crawling tells Google that it sees a particular webpage, but there isn’t a change in the ranking until Google has done further research and analysis on that page’s importance/authority within the whole search ecosystem.