One webmaster asked John Mueller about how long does SEO take for new pages?
Instead of the usual “it depends” answer, John was quite detailed in his explanations. So let’s go through them one by one.
John first went through a couple of disclaimers. The first one is that Google does not guarantee indexing. For any specific page.
He explained that most search engines don’t index much of the content on the web.The reason why is because there’s a lot of duplicate content that is not worthy of being indexed.
The other reason is because a lot of content is unlikely to ever be read by site users, so indexing it is not useful from Google’s perspective.
It’s likely to take several hours to several weeks for any published page to be indexed. Most good content is picked up and indexed within around a week’s time.
There could also be technical issues throughout the web, and these could make indexing take longer. It also could be that Google’s systems are busy with other tasks.
However, there are a number of things you can do on your side to really speed up things.
He recommends making sure that your server can handle a good quantity of server requests in a timely manner.
If your server slows down for any reason, then search engines may slow down also. You also want to link to your new pages within your website prominently.
The easier you can make it for Google to recognize important pages, the easier it is to prioritize indexing and crawling.
One example he illustrates is an e-commerce website. If you link to new products on your home page, then that’s an easier way for Google to find them as opposed to something where products are several levels deep within the site.
Don’t fill your website with URLs that are unnecessary and irrelevant to pursuing the buying of those products. Search engines could get bogged down even trying to process all of these URLs.
Don’t forget about site quality, and make sure that you work to keep that quality high. The easier that Google can figure out that your site is a quality site, the easier it will be for Google to determine that the site is critical for their users to visit.
You can watch the full video below.
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Ask Googlebot. I’m here from Google’s search relations team to answer your questions about Google search. Today’s question comes from YouTube.
The user filecoffee is asking, how long does SEO take for new pages? Answering this question is hard. I’d love to just throw my hands up and declare it depends. And leave it at that. But let’s take a look. I’ll focus on two parts here: indexing and how to speed things up.
First, however, two short disclaimers: there’s no guarantee that Google will index any particular page. In fact, most search engines don’t index a lot of the content on the web. On the one hand, there’s a lot of duplicate content on the web that doesn’t need to be indexed. On the other hand, there’s a lot of content that is unlikely to ever be seen by users, so it’s not useful to index it.
The other disclaimer is that even when something is indexed, it’s not necessarily shown to users, and it can drop out of the index over time. So, let’s start from the top.
When a new page is published on a website, it can take anywhere from several hours to several weeks for it to be indexed. In practice, I suspect most good content is picked up and indexed within about a week.
Sometimes there are technical issues on the web that make it take longer. And sometimes it’s just that our systems are busy with other things. There are a few things you can do to help speed this up. Make sure that your server can handle a reasonable number of requests in a timely way. When your server slows down, search engines tend to slow down as well. Link to your new pages prominently within your website. The easier our systems can recognize that you think this is an important page, the easier it is for them to prioritize crawling and indexing of it.
For example, if your website is for e-commerce, it helps our systems to find links to your new products on your homepage so that we don’t have to crawl through several layers of categories to find them. Avoid filling your website with unnecessary URLs. Whether it’s an event calendar that goes back to the dawn of civilization, or shop category pages that allow filtering and sorting by every possible combination. Search engines can get bogged down trying to figure out all of these URLs and might miss URLs that you do care about.
On dynamic websites like these, work to keep functionality open for users. while preventing crawlers from getting lost. Again, make it easy for our systems to recognize that your new pages are important. Then, use URL submission methods available to you. Use a sitemap to tell Google about new pages automatically. For individual URLs, use the inspect URL tool in Search Console.
Last but definitely not least, keep your website’s overall quality high. Taking a step back, the easier it is for our systems to recognize that your website is critical for users on the web, the better they can prioritize the website for crawling and indexing. This is easier said than done, of course. And just to get back to our disclaimer: forcing something to be indexed does not mean Google will show it prominently in search.
And it does not mean that it will remain indexed. The best way to improve those parts is to make your site fantastic overall. So in short, there are lot of aspects that come into play with making new pages visible in search. There’s no absolute timeline for any of these steps, and they can change over time. Apart from the technical issues, it’s also important to keep the overall quality of the website in mind. Google systems want to recommend fantastic content to users as quickly as possible. So it’s always worth focusing on that.
And that’s it for this time. I hope you found this episode useful and insightful. See you in the next episode of Ask Googlebot. Don’t forget to subscribe to see the next episodes.
