Last night I was writing a blog post on TheAbundantArtist.com. When I was done writing the post I accidentally hit publish instead of pushing the time out for the next morning. When I noticed it, about five minutes had gone by. I unpublished, moved the time, and moved on to another project.
Later I was checking rankings for the site and I came across this.
That text that I circled? That’s from that blog post that was online for about five minutes, which I published this morning. Oh, and the date of Mar 19, 2010? That text does not live on the page with that date.
What does this mean? It could be several things.
1. It was a fluke. This seems likely to me, though I’d love to hear other SEO’s thoughts.
2. Google has me bookmarked to index anytime I change anything – I kinda doubt it.
3. Google followed a tweet that led to my site at just the right time. Brent Payne pointed out that Google is doing some strange stuff with Twitter.
4. Google indexes websites a LOT faster than people realize. There are (still) companies out there that make money ‘submitting’ you to search engines. There’s no need for this.
Thoughts?
Hi Cory,
I don't know what the exact parameters are, but Google does indeed check certain websites at certain times - when it's most likely a new post will be published. I haven't seen this on sites where people only post a few times a month but for sites that publish daily, I've seen it happen quite a bit. My website gets hit by the Googlebot at least 3 times a day, which I've verified, and sometimes the post will appear with a "site:" query within 5 minutes. Please note that because it appears in the results, it doesn't mean it's fully indexed. Usually when you see it for the first time, either the meta description (if you have one) or the first 150 characters of the post will appear as the snippet.
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