Ask HN: How long to wait between SEO tweaks?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1657789

by paulsingh • 16 years ago

1 11 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been trying a bunch of things on a side project of mine (NotaryCRM.com) to have it rank higher for specific terms -- I've basically followed all the tactical advice that others have given about keyword placement, title tags, etc.

I know this is something that takes time, but how long do you guys usually wait between "tweaks" to decide if something worked or not?

ScottWhigham3• 16 years ago

Generally for me I wait at least one "turn" of the PageRank and possibly two. Closely monitor when Google does a PageRank update and check your PR then to see if what you wanted occurred.

paulsingh3• 16 years ago

So, from what I understand, it's a period of months... rather than weeks or days? If so, what do you do in the meantime?

ScottWhigham3• 16 years ago

Well, I work on other aspects of the business. Some things I know whether they work because I can see them in the serps. Others - like trying to increase PR - take longer.

SEO isn't my #1 priority right now so I'm not really focused too much on it ATM. Right now, I'm heavily getting content together. I've only done a few things here and there for SEO in the past 3-4 months.

patio112• 16 years ago

Google recalculates most things that matter in close to real time these days. Toolbar PageRank is not something which matters. Updating toolbar PageRank on a once-in-several-months schedule is largely for historical reasons, does nothing for your website, and is kept around virtually entirely to placate people who know just enough about SEO to hurt themselves.

ScottWhigham3• 16 years ago

My experience with "What happens when PageRank rises/falls" does not mirror what you said and I've been doing this for 4-5 years at a "basic" level. When a PR change occurs on our site, we definitely see traffic shifts both in terms of the number of visitors and in the quality of traffic. No question. The most recent one I remember having a big impact on us was May, 2010. We had about 3 pages go from a 4 to a 0 (still don't know why) and almost immediately our traffic numbers + quality for those pages was #$&%.

Note that the change in traffic was right at/around the time of the PR change - not a month before, two months before, or even a week before.

paulsingh3• 16 years ago

Ok, so I've got ~15K pages on my site now (it's a directory for mobile notary publics) - how long would you wait in between page-level tweaks?

(I notice that Google crawls about 500 pages per day... So, should I be waiting at least 30 days in between tweaks to let them crawl everything?)

il2• 16 years ago

Toolbar PageRank updates are done on a rolling basis too now, they stopped doing massive updates every few months some time ago.

Patrick is right, PageRank is basically a completely worthless indicator. Monitoring your position in the SERPS for lots of keywords(including long tails) is the best way to see if SEO is paying off quickly.

garydrinksd• 16 years ago

if anyone is waiting for the visible toolbar PageRank to increase or decrease, i seriously doubt their high level knowledge of SEO. Toolbar PageRank is simply a historical indicator. Many times it is weeks, if not months old. And if you do any kind of research, you'll see that PageRank does NOT equal rankings. It can help as a strength indicator of your site, but correlation does NOT equal causation.

Ask HN: How long to wait between SEO tweaks?

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