Google
Everflux Phenomena
The
Google Everflux Phenomena
Copyright © 2003, John Buchanan
SE-Secrets.com
http://www.se-secrets.com
I
tend to spend a lot of time in various search
engine forums and newsgroups answering questions
related to search engines. One of the most common
questions that seems to come up is along the lines
of:
"My
site was in Google yesterday and ranking well
and today it's gone! What happened?"
or
"I
made some changes to my site and Google picked
them up, but now, it shows the old page again.
Why would Google do this?"
and
a number of other variations on the above two
questions.
With
the importance of Google these days, it's no wonder
that situations like the above would have webmasters
quite worried. After all, with all the reports
of sites being penalized or banned, having your
site completely disappear could be a bit troublesome.
Luckily,
there is a very easy explanation for the above
phenomena and it's been lovingly referred to as
"Everflux". What exactly is everflux?
Well,
"everflux" stems from Google's attempt
to create the freshest possible index and by fresh
I mean up-to-date. To understand this, let's look
first at Google's normal update cycle.
Generally,
somewhere around the beginning of the month (all
though this can vary widely such as in the past
couple of months) Google's primary spider (actually
there are many more than one primary spider, but
for simplicity I'm going with the singular) heads
out and begins to index the sites in it's database.
This process generally takes anywhere from 5 to
10 days. During this time, the spider indexes
any new pages and re-indexes pages already in
it's index.
After
this spidering process occurs, there is generally
about a two to three week delay before the results
from this spidering are publicly available. During
this period, which has affectionately been termed
the "Google Dance" the results returned
from Google tend to fluctuate a bit. This "dance"
can last anywhere from 2 or 3 days up to about
1 week.
This
is the normal cycle for Google and it does quite
well except for sites where the content changes
frequently such as news sites etc. This is because,
with the current system, there can be anywhere
from a 2 or 3 week minimum delay for changes to
a webpage or site to be reflected in the primary
database and up to 6 or even 7 weeks depending
on when the changes were made to a site. If changes
were made in time for the monthly spidering, those
changes would be reflected in a couple of weeks,
but if the changes were made after the monthly
spidering, then the site would have to wait for
the following months spidering to be picked up
and it would end up taking much longer.
Even
a two or three week delay is too long when dealing
with breaking news and other current events. The
solution? Google's "Freshbot".
Google's
"Freshbot" as it has been termed is
a secondary spider that is constantly crawling
the web. It crawls sites Google has found to be
either news sites or other important sites that
change on a constant basis. It also tends to find
sites that have either recently changed or are
brand new.
This
secondary spider adds it's findings not to the
main database but to a temporary database. This
temporary database is incorporated into the results
returned from the primary (main) database which
allows Google to continue its normal update cycle
but also return very fresh and up-to-date content.
The
confusion comes from the fact that this temporary
database that is used by the Freshbot is, in effect,
rewritten on a daily basis with the results from
the latest round of spidering. This means that
a page that was in the temporary database on one
day may be completely missing the next.
This
can cause a lot of confusion as a new site could
be found one day by the Freshbot and added to
the temporary database only to be overwritten
and disappear the following. The same goes for
changes to a page that are found by the Freshbot
and then revert to the old version within a day
or two. This is simply the natural "flux"
caused by this temporary database.
The
good news is that these sites that are found and
then disappear will almost always reappear permanently
once the primary spider crawls them and they are
added to the main index.
So,
if this has happened, is happening, or does happen
to you at some point, never fear, it is simply
the Google "Everflux" phenomena at work.
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John Buchanan is the author of the book "The
Insider's Guide to
Dominating The Search Engines", and a search
engine optimization
professional. Visit him at http://www.se-secrets.com
for more
information or with any questions.
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