5 Questions: Do You Have Answers?
By Matt McGee on Oct 15, 2008 | comments (12)
1. In Google Webmaster Central, if I change the crawl rate, how soon does that take effect? Will Googlebot obey the new crawl rate immediately?
2. We know that Google keeps a search history (unless you turn it off), and part of that search history is the results you click on. So, if I have a history of clicking on … say … video results … will Google be more likely to show me videos in future searches?
3. When doing a local search, does your own IP address influence the sites that get returned and/or their rankings?
4. Why would Google have a page in its index, yet not show a cached version of the page? (Note: there is nothing to stop Google from caching it; there’s no use of the “noarchive” tag or anything like that. Google is free to cache the page, but is not doing so.)
5. On digg, users can “favorite” stories they like. Does favoriting a story help it reach the home page more quickly? No one ever seems to talk about favoriting stories on digg, and what impact it has, if any.
Got answers? Please leave a comment and share your wisdom!
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On Oct 15, 2008, matt said:
1- yes (delay of 48hours)
2- yes
3- yes
4- cached version is for anti-cloaking measure
5- people are according too much importance to digg,stumbleupon and all these boring wesites..don’t ask yourself these kind of questions…
On Oct 15, 2008, Ryan Rose said:
Matt,
#1 I think the crawl delay is there to passify the masses. I believe crawl rate is determined by the frequency of updated content and showing the search engines through the passage of time that there is a steady stream of new info.
#2 No
#3 No
#4 Not sure. My guess is that something is getting cloaked.
#5 Undecided.
On Oct 15, 2008, Stever said:
#1 – not sure and for most small biz sites letting google determine its own crawl rate is just fine. I have doubts it obeys it either if you were to give it a frequency that is far higher that the actual frequency of updates. That could even have effects on Trust Rank if not now then in the future.
#2 – I presume so
#3 – Yup, seen it in action doing searches in other cities.
#4 – weird sitemap problems? weird cloaking stuff?
#5 – social networking annoys the heck out of me. so…no comment
On Oct 15, 2008, MiriamEllis said:
#3 – Yes, it can. I have been seeing local searches returning personalized results in organic for some time now. When this happens, Google shows you a little snippet in the blue bar that reads something along the lines of these “these results have been customized for the SF Bay Area” or something like that. So, it definitely knows where you are.
It can actually be annoying if you’re trying to research other regions.
Miriam
On Oct 15, 2008, Dev Basu said:
#1 – Usually within 48 hours if the site is crawled once or twice a week atleast.
#2 Not to my knowledge spanning over 2 odd years of search history accumulated.
#3 Not in Canada atleast. I can see the same local rankings from different parts of Ontario, British columbia, and in Quebec.
#4 My best guess is that it is cloaked as well.
#5 Not that involved myself (starting to hate Digg), but not to my understanding of far more involved users.
On Oct 15, 2008, Stever said:
@Dev, I’ve seen it in Canada. Not with the blue bar notice that Miriam mentions, but see slightly different results for some searches in British Columbia vs. same search done while I was in Nova Scotia last month. Granted that could have been due to my search history in my Google account here in BC, maybe???
On Oct 16, 2008, AhmedF said:
#4 – there is a meta tag the equates do ‘Do not show a cache of this page’ – Google is just following that tag.
#5 – I’m pretty sure its purely for bookmarking purposes.
On Oct 17, 2008, Matt McGee said:
Interesting to see some disagreement in the answers here, but that’s good, I think. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks.
On Oct 19, 2008, António Dias said:
#2 – I’d think that Google will also check you against a database of users with a similar track and all the metrics they check before serving you more ads. Short answer is yes:)
On Oct 19, 2008, Stever said:
More on cached pages. I noticed that caching takes a bit of time, well after it was actually indexed. A couple days or more.
And there are two cache versions at different time intervals. The “text version” cache can be more up to date than the full cache version if content is updating.
So if the page you were looking at was not cached, check again a few days later, it might be there.
On Oct 20, 2008, david king said:
from personal experience google local is a growing area. therefore ip must make a huge difference.
On Oct 21, 2008, sfowler said:
1) It depends, since Google never exactly follows the requested crawl rate. It may crawl a daily site weekly, or a yearly site monthly. By providing a crawl rate you’re just helping the bots sort things; it’s never an exact science.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.