Saturday, November 29, 2014

Google appears very slow at scanning and reindexing Australian sites I've checked.

I've been checking the .Melbourne site and usually in the past my sites can get reindexed in a few days. I thus suggest to people for SEO to make a change and then wait a week until the change has taken effect.

However as an indirect result of this monitoring I noticed the latest versions of my sites are not in Google's cache since October.

To me that's really disturbing. We could infer quite a few things from this and none are particularly good for websites.

1. Google has reduced the importance of scanning sites in terms of the time between scans. I've always said a company's site is the best place to check for the latest information (hence the reason JustLocal links direct to the site) as I've found Google to be slow at reindexing, but never this slow.

2. If you're trying to optimise your site in terms of SEO with Google then my earlier wait a week suggestion is way off. It may now be a month or more. That has serious implications for those who want to get results from adjusting their site and getting feedback on those changes. It certainly plays into the hands for SEO providers who say it can take months for changes to ripple through. Now you may not see any effect for a month or two and that means you end up paying more until you know what they're doing is working or not. That's a real worry as many SEO practitioners are scammers and it will cost you more before you know.

Perhaps this is good for JustLocal. If you're looking for the latest information from a local business on JustLocal you'll always find it on their site. The site for a business is one click away from your JustLocal postcode page.

Certainly very disturbing. Are websites now being treated as static brochure by Google? This means if you're looking for the latest information from a site Google is not the place to go. Perhaps it's time to look for different places to obtain the latest information that's important to you.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au
Helping local businesses to be found.

PS. If you want to see when your site was last scanned you can type cache: followed by your site into Google as a query and you'll see the cached version of your site.

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