One SEO professional (Barry Schwartz, actually) asked John Mueller about whether they should be submitting a blog to Search Console.
Barry said that this blog is brand new, and thus they don’t really have any links.
The question was: because they are brand-new to blogging, with zero links, would John recommend that they submit URLs as they are published to Google Search Console Inspect URL tool, then request indexing for new blogs that have no links to it?
Or, is there no point and it’s not really going to help?
John explained that there’s no disadvantage to doing this the way it’s explained. He believes that if it’s a new site, where there are absolutely no signals or any information about the site at all, then at least telling Google about the URLs is a way of getting that initial foot in the door.
However, it’s not a guarantee that they will pick this up.
If you know someone else who is blogging, and you can work together with them and perhaps get a link to your site, something along those lines.
This would do a lot more than just going to Search Console and saying “I want this URL indexed immediately.”
This happens at approximately the 07:57 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 3 7:57
Thanks for having me. So I started a new blog. I’m new to blogging. And it’s been amazing, amazing experience to start from scratch to be honest. Makes me think a lot about new questions. Anyway, brand new blog, no links to it, would you recommend that you submit URLs as you publish them using the Google Search Console inspect URL, then request indexing for new blogs that have no links to it? Or there’s no point, it’s not going to really help? Your sitemap? WordPress?
John 8:30
Yeah, I think again, I mean, it’s not that there’s any disadvantage of doing that. I think if it’s a new site, where we really have absolutely no signals, or no information about it at all, then at least telling us about the URLs is a way of kind of like getting that initial foot in the door.
But it’s not a guarantee that we’ll pick that up. So that’s something where probably, you know someone else who is blogging, and you can kind of like, work together with them and maybe get a link to your site, something along those lines.
That probably would do a lot more than just going to Search Console and saying, I want this URL indexed immediately.
SEO Professional 3 9:12
Yeah I’m trying not to take that route. I want to try it like, brand new. Nobody knows me and I want to see what happens kind of thing. The next question I have is around the Google Search Console report. Links report. I know nobody talks about it anymore.
I’m just curious. Again, I wonder if anybody was linking to me. It shows no external link and shows internal links. Probably ’cause I’m linking internally and the blog’s set up that way. But how long does it take typically- a new site that has brand new- and has links?
How long does it usually take Google to pick up links in that report? Is it like pretty quick, like the performance report and crawl stats report? Or is it more like months or so?
John 9:53
I would have to ask the team. My understanding is that a lot of the reports in Search Console are recalculated every three to four days. So in terms of like about a week, you should probably see some data there. The tricky part I guess, with the links report, is that we show a sample of the links to your site. So that doesn’t mean, we would immediately populate that one link that we found to your site.
So that’s something where, I don’t know, I’m kind of curious to see how long it takes to get that picked up. But it’s not a matter of months. And then it’s not a matter of kind of like hours like with the performance report.
It’s more along the line, I’d say, like a week, one and a half weeks, something like that should be a reasonable timeframe.