How Fast Is Google Indexing Your Site?

SEO By The Sea highlighted an article written by David Degrelle of e-SEMA, looking at the speed of Google in relation to the crawl rate and indexing of web pages. Coincidentally, Bill (The Intern) and I were playing around with Google search results on Friday and I casually stated that I bet the post written on search engine spam Friday morning would actually show up #1 for the applicable search term (in traditional Google search results) by Monday morning.

I was wrong. The KoMarketing Associates Blog was #1 for the term by before noon on Friday (the same day).

There are a couple key points to make in conjunction with the speed of indexing and reasons why I believe it happened so quickly.

• Speed of The Crawl and Indexing
  When we redesigned the website, using PHP and WordPress, we took specific precautions to make certain that search engines like Google 1.) did not get confused when we redesigned (and changed web addresses) and 2.) were not confused with the potential duplicate content penalties that can be realized when using WordPress and starting a new blog. I have a post in the works that specifically tackles this topic, but the bottom line here is that I know Google has been crawling and indexing our blog posts within a 48 hour window of time since the relaunch.
• No More Monthly Indexing
  While there probably are still updates that Google makes to it’s search index on an interval-style basis, Matt Cutts had already alluded to the fact that Google was updating it’s index on a near weekly basis and this was confirmed at a recent meeting held by SEMNE with Dan Crow, Director of Crawl Systems at Google.

What sped the process up for our post?
First, there were very few results associated to the term (less than 1,000) and second, (and more importantly) all of the first page results were from Google’s Supplemental Index. Given that the posts on our blog are not (yet) being thrown into the supplemental results – and all of the results for the term in question were being pulled from the supplemental index – it would make sense that if someone wrote something applicable to the search term (and it was indexed), it would immediately appear near the top of the search result listings (once it was indexed). Apologies if I made that last sentence way more confusing that it needed to be.

Key Takeaways
Please note that the purpose of the post is not meant to illustrate KoMarketing Associates’ ability to rank well for completely unrelated (and low volume) search terms. There are two key ideas that are meant to be conveyed:

• Google can potentially crawl, index and update their index on a daily rate (at least hourly, as evidenced by the screenshots below)
• The more effective your website is, in terms of enabling search engines like Google to crawl and index content, the better (and faster) the opportunity to get your valuable content out to the online audience through organic search.

Screenshots
Screenshot of Google Search Results prior to the blog post

Screenshot of Google Search Results at 11:47 AM on Friday
Note that the KoMarketing Associates Blog itself had been indexed, but not the specific post.

Screenshot of Google Search Results Monday morning
Now, both the individual post and the KoMarketing Associates Blog are indexed and showing up as #1 and 2 in Google Search Results.