Google Update Primer - What Happens When Google Updates?

by Darren McLaughlin

One of the most exciting (or is it?) things you can hear is the sound “Google is updating!”. Depending on what you’ve been up to, that could mean increased income, which is music to almost anyone’s ears. But what exactly is a “Google Update”? The meaning has changed quite a bit in the last few years.

Types of Google Updates:

1) Adding new pages to the index. It’s safe to say that new pages are always added to the index.
2) Backlinks calculated. This occurs less frequently than it used to, but you should see new backlink totals every 3 or so months.
3) Pagerank re-calculated. This happens on the same schedule as the backlinks being updated.

Now you also need to keep in mind that there are a number of other factors that affect your website specifically. The Pagerank of your website, and other factors, determines the speed of update. If you have a highly popular website with a ton of incoming links, then you’ll be updated more often than a website with less popularity.

What should I do during a Google update?

Nothing. There’s nothing to do, except to continue to work on your website. The bottom line is, Google will update no matter what. Spend your time working on things you can control, and leave the updates to occur in the background. The primary type of update to be concerned with is a SERPS update, which will actually affect your income.

You may see very strange things during a Google update

Don’t be nervous. Google utilizes a great number of Data centers, so you will probably see a bunch of strange values or results as an update goes on. This is to be expected, so there’s no reason to get too excited. The current update has been going on for several days and is still displaying odd data.