Is the concept of a "backlink snapshot" with Google a thing of the past?

I haven't been playing the SEO game very long. My first foray into the art came several years ago when I bought an SEO for Dummies book and the SEM for Dummies book. (my take - SEO for dummies is good to learn some basics while the SEM for dummies was directions on how to use websites, something I already know, and was worthless).

As I delved deeper into the ins and outs of optimizing a website, one of the things that nearly all SEO "experts" talked about was the "snapshot" of backlinks that Google took every quarter. It was these backlinks that supposedly made up the backbone of the next quarter's Pagerank. I've seen a lot of folks posting on blogs and message boards recently about the "snapshot" taken at the beginning of July 2007, and that this was the "big one" in preparation for the Quarter 3 toolbar update (which hasn't occurred yet, just like I predicted). So its something that at least some folks still believe.

It's all hogwash. Hooey. Bunk. BS.

Google has become a much more fluid machine, and even if they don't yet have a real-time "snapshot" of each website, the backlinks, rankings, etc. are updated weekly for new, lower ranked sites, and as often as hourly for more highly ranked pages. Heck, even the Google Watchdog blog that doesn't yet have any Pagerank on the toolbar can have a new post indexed in several hours. Things don't work the way they once did, and the backlink "snapshot" is among the things that just doesn't fit with Google's updated modus operandi.

I've had at least 3 backlink updates in my webmaster tools over the past 6-7 weeks, and the webmaster tools are notoriously behind on the backlink list. If this were the case, why would Google used some arbitrary date months in the past to gauge the worth of a site? The answer is that they wouldn't. It may be entirely possible that when doing a toolbar PR update, they take a "snapshot" one day and begin the update over the next week. But, that would be for purposes of showing a public number that may rise or fall over weeks and months behind the scenes and in the hidden depths of Google's servers.

I can't ever guess what goes on in the giant borg brain over at Google for sure, but I'm almost positive that the idea of a backlink "snapshot" is already archaic in the fast moving and quickly developing world of search engines and SEO. I haven't yet learned enough about SEO to consider myself an expert, but I'm pretty good at deductive logic, and its a fairly simple deduction to make that Google has abandoned the quarterly backlink "snapshot". They've moved past that to better techniques that work more closely to real time. And while Google is evolving, a lot of so-called SEO "experts" are not keeping up. I guess (hope) Natural Selection will weed them out.