'Indexing'

[Martin P]

I don't really understand this,
If I update a website, or delete some text, for example, how long does it take for the new text to show up in Google when searching for the same term?
Or dosn't it update?:|
I'm guessing also it depends on other things?

[Bathead]

It depends on how often Google crawls the site and how deep the page in question is. It could also depend on frequency of content updating, size, how important Google deems the site to be etc. A homepage could take a few days but an obscure page deep in the site could potentially take months.

The page will be indexed if it can be reached. Whether the search will have a result in the same position is another matter.

[Martin P]

Cheers,

The reason I ask, is because yesterday I searched for a term on Google, and the title link I clicked, (and the content under the title I saw), was totally different to the page that showed on the website. So I'm guessing things were deleted or edited on the website, and Google hadn't updated it? Is that right(ish)?

So when Google next crawls the site, the ranking might change, E.g. if there is less content Etc.?

Cheers,

[Bathead]

yep the title and description will remain until the page is indexed and those tags are updated. Or the page could have a 301 redirect.

When a page is amended it can always effect the positioning, for many reason. But without knowing the specifics it is guesswork.

[JustOneUK]

Cheers,

The reason I ask, is because yesterday I searched for a term on Google, and the title link I clicked, (and the content under the title I saw), was totally different to the page that showed on the website. So I'm guessing things were deleted or edited on the website, and Google hadn't updated it? Is that right(ish)?
,There's certain techniques to display one thing but show another, it's not recommended though and thought of as black-hat (or certainly very grey)

[domokun]

On the Google results page, under each result, you should see a link for "View cached snapshot of this page".

That will show you what Google saw last time they visited the site in question.

I use it a lot as some of the small blogs I browse frequently move and delete pages that Im still interested in reading.

[OldWelshGuy]

The process of serving one lot of infomation to the spiders and another to the user is known as cloaking, and is VERY black hat, it is an instant ban (one of the few things that get you banned rather than penalised) if detected. There are many ways to do this, user agent (browser), or the best (I am not saying it is good I am just grading the black hat method), is to use IP cloaking. This works by serving content based on the IP range of the visitor. You know all the search engine IP's, so you serve them something completely different to normal users.

Cloaking is bad, and IF done properly, you the humble user will NEVER be able to detect it, as the page will make use of nocache tags, meaning there will be no public cache available.

It's not big, but it is clever :D