Bitcoin Forum

I've just added a couple of lines to a post of mine on page two of this board. As it's an edited post, SMF doesn't bump the thread. I'd be interested to know if Google picks up the change and re-indexes it. I appreciate that I could have made a new post and deleted the old one, and this would have resulted in a bump.

Google index sites after x amount of times AFAIK...

You may want to read the whole contents of that page.

I understand all that, but does Google rely on SMF reporting that a page has changed. There is a typo in my sentence, so it will be interesting to see if it does get indexed. I'll give it a day or so, and then check. Bitcoin Talk is an important site, so changes seem to be indexed fairly quickly.

Yes, Google bots will index the change with no problem, they index what they read. Usually, forums discussions are crawled more often than websites. You can ping the URL if you want but pretty useless considering it's a forum.

Well Google has found a sentence from the opening post.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22As+it%27s+an+edited+post%2C+SMF+doesn%27t+bump+the+thread.%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b
That was pretty quick, and it was obviously made after the edit.
I searched for the edit, and I got this response

This seems to indicate that Google doesn't look at historic posts for changes. This probably makes sense, as otherwise the workload would be enormous,even for Google.

Some years ago I was very active in websites and web programming. Despite the fact that seo was my weak point, luckily I got a lot of traffic.
When my website was new and unpopular, it was very hard for me to index added news, I was trying to ping website and get high PR. Engine had to do nothing with seo to be fair, all you need is seo optimized template to correctly index everything in google. Once your website becomes famous, old, high reputation and etc, google visits has a lot of attention on you, so your website indexes very quickly and edited threads too.
It don't takes any information from smf to reniew any indexed page.

Well it hasn't indexed my edited additon.We'll see if it picks it up tomorrow, but I thinit unlikely. Based on the evidence so far, it looks as if Google may ask SMF for a list of the latest posts. I'll copy the post tomorrow and bump the thread, then I'll delete the old post to see how Google handles that. I might even correct the typos as well. :)

Hello. Actually, Google does re-index threads, especially considering that this forum is very popular. However, it takes some time. I wouldn`t expect changes in the index somewhere soon, if I was you. Don`t even sure, that deleting original post will fix this issue, because an old version is already in Google`s index and if you try, you can even find links for threads that are long gone in there.
Sorry for being not helpful  ::)

OK I've edited another post of mine from back in 2016, Let's see how it handles that one.

So I think that proves that Google needs a prompt from SMF to re-index a thread. It's what I would have expected, but it seems to run counter to everybody else's belief.

The forum has a sitemap? if so, the frequency of updates can be set properly

A post edit doesn't seem to count as an update

It doesn't work like this. Google bots don't crawl URL daily, it depends on what happens usually in this URL and the frequency. If you edited a post from 2016 don't hope to see Google bots crawling the post anytime soon (unless something happened in the discussion otherwise you can wait more than a fresh URL

For dynamic content a dynamic sitemap is required. I'm not sure if this forum has one, it's not installed by default.
There's a mod to add one on SMF, check here http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3393

but we never know for sure when it will be updated because there is a queue of updates

I don't need this to be updated, it was just an empirical test to check on Google's actions. it didn't seem sensible for Google to go through a data base containing millions of posts on the offchance that one of the old ones had a minor change. It would be much more efficient to check for SMF re-indexing or thread updates.

You have to delete or post something from/to a topic for the topic to be marked as modified in the sitemap. Google probably still updates their cache even without this, but I suppose it'd take a while.

I wrote the sitemap handling years ago. It's probably due for a rewrite, TBH, but who knows when I'll have time for that.

Thanks for the clarification. It isn't an important issue, I was just interested to discover how it works. I've noticed that a few of the bounty spammers edit old posts.

Google will crawl it again if you submit the url again.

I have been working for SEO company for awhile but I have not forgotten how they do it so that google will re-index what had been indexed before. I think if the thread is updated after all you as a user can reply to it with substantial information, google will eventually index the text including the edition you've made.

If you reply to an old thread, then obviously sMF will bump it, and it will be re-indexed. I was interested in discovering how Google handled a post that was edited when the thread isn't bumped. Obviously it doesn't exist as a page, and the page has to be created by SMF. If it checked all threads on a regular basis, it would put a massive load on the forum server.