GoogleGuy Says More

In a few WebmasterWorld threads, GoogleGuy has shed a little more light onto search engine ranking placement (SERP) at Google. Some of the factors have been known to exist for quite some time. Some have been debated, and are now confirmed, albeit he stops short of saying how much weighting is applied to those factors.



GoogleGuy answered a direct question regarding the fresh indexing of a single page and whether they are factored into the SERPS. His answer was, "typically yes, for on-page factors." He also added that on-page factors do include outbound links from the source page as well.



Major Google updates (not toolbar PageRank) which affect SERPS may be a thing of the past. It appears that they are of a rolling nature, or "regular flux". GoogleGuy also says that "off-page factors can be updated asynchronously" such as inbound links to a source page which will affect the ranking of that page.



Asynchronously is not elaborated on by GoogleGuy, he does not answer the question on "how quickly" these changes take effect. I assume this would depend on how quickly their bots find the off-page factors and when they run their processes against them. Although he says that they're "well out of the monthly update mode; it's much smoother to update the index incrementally over time."



All of this points towards a higher level of link analysis. To some extent, the burden of this could rest on MapReduce which is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Google has used 900 separate instances of MapReduce on the production index as of September of 2004. A majority of these instances occurred during the incremental backlink updates that started to appear as early as mid-June.



The extent of such analysis is not really known. However, it is readily apparent that they are able to process a fresh crawl and update the index for on and off-page factors very rapidly. It is also apparent that PageRank does not play so much a part in the incremental updates, for that is a process that is conducted separately and it is anyone's guess as to when.