When does google update?

[MarketJunction]

Just wondering how to find out when Google updates. Is there a URL or time line?

I know how to find out what is likely to happen at update time, but no clue on when it happens.

Thanks

[jg_v7n]

There is no set timeline; much of the updating process now goes on constantly, backlinks and SERPs can often change seemingly at random. You can expect toolbar PR updates every few months or so, maybe the next one will be early in the new year.

[minstrel]

From the horse's mouth:

Matt Cutt's Blog: What's an update?

What is an update? Google updates its index data, including backlinks and PageRank, continually and continuously. We only export new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data every three months or so though. (We started doing that last year when too many SEOs were suffering from “B.O.”, short for backlink obsession.) When new backlinks/PageRank appear, we’ve already factored that into our rankings quite a while ago. So new backlinks/PageRank are fun to see, but it’s not an update; it’s just already-factored-in data being exported visibly for the first time in a while.

Google also crawls and updates its index every day, so different or more index data usually isn’t an update either. The term “everflux” is often used to describe the constant state of low-level changes as we crawl the web and rankings consequently change to a minor degree. That’s normal, and that’s not an update.

Usually, what registers with an update to the webmaster community is when we update an algorithm (or its data), change our scoring algorithms, or switch over to a new piece of infrastructure. Technically Update Gilligan is just backlink/PageRank data becoming visible once more, not a real update. There haven’t been any substantial algorithmic changes in our scoring in the last few days. I’m happy to try to give weather reports when we do our update scoring/algo data though.

[MarketJunction]

Super!

Thanks for the details.

[Dustin07]

Google also crawls and updates its index every day, so different or more index data usually isn’t an update either. The term “everflux” is often used to describe the constant state of low-level changes as we crawl the web and rankings consequently change to a minor degree. That’s normal, and that’s not an update.

sorry old post. but to understand this... is this why I've seen a lot of changes to my SERPs but no new indexing of new pages in the last couple weeks?

Still not sure why certain pages aren't getting indexed though, even with this in mind. I have pages that have been around longer than the SEO contest, yet soo many sites have been indexed, backlinked too, and already changed rank a few times... all that and I haven't even gotten the page indexed yet... I've submitted it and have backlinks...

[Jan]

Just a guess, but I tend to believe that new pages taking ages to get indexed might be a sign of a penalty for the site in Google. I saw it happen on a pr6 site at the same time as the Googlebot crawl frequency of its main (and old) pages decreased from daily to once every ten days (about).
It started with Jagger

[Dustin07]

well I screwed up my sitemap I think, so that could be causing some issue I suppose.