Have you ever found yourself wondering why your blog content isn’t showing up anywhere on Google, even after you have done your keyword research and optimized for SEO using the best tools available?
Sure, you realize that it can take a long time before you rank highly, but sometimes it seems like Google can’t even tell that your content even exists.
It isn’t being recorded on the first page or even the first ten pages.
So what exactly is the problem here? How can you know what you did wrong? How long does it take for results to show?
In many cases, the answer is all about indexing. If Google hasn’t been able to index your content, there’s no way it will ever get any organic traffic.
In this article, we will go over the basics of indexing, and show you how to make sure that you are giving your content the best chance to get ranked by Google – as quickly as possible!
We will also answer the question, “How long does it take Google to index your website?”, so that you can make sure that the work you are putting in is paying off.
First, let’s take a quick crash course on Google indexing.
What does “Index” Mean?
Indexing is one of the fundamental concepts of SEO.
In the simplest terms, indexing refers to sharing your website’s content with Google.
Google gains the information that it needs to create its indexes through crawling. This is where the search engine scans the code of every URL on your website.
Indexing in Simple Terms
To explain this using an analogy, let’s say that you want to go get Thai food for dinner tonight, but you are in a new city and haven’t learned where the best place to eat might be.
In a world without smartphones and Amazon Alexa, one way to deal with this situation would be to ask a friend who has plenty of time on their hands to go out to every Thai restaurant in the city and learn everything that they possibly can about the menu, ambiance, and anything else that makes them desirable dining locations. This is like how Google “crawls” your website.
Imagine that this friend (who by now might be questioning the benefits of your relationship) finishes “crawling” every Thai restaurant in the city then brings you reams of notes about each of them. This can be considered the “index.”
A restaurant could easily be avoided in the crawling process if it doesn’t meet certain requirements, like if they failed a recent health inspection. This is like a sketchy keyword-stuffing website being denied by Google’s crawlers so that it doesn’t show up in the search engine results.
All the restaurants that meet the requirements that you have set can be considered “indexed” because you now have the information that you need about them. The friend can then go through the index that they created to come up with a final ranking, where the very best and most relevant options appear in order.
Now you have found the best possible place to eat, and you probably owe your friend a major favor! (Thank God that Google does this kind of thing for free online.)
Questions About Indexing
Hopefully, this example has cleared some things up!
An important aspect of this to consider is that the crawling part of the process takes more time than you might think. There is a seemingly endless amount of information on the internet for Google to sift through.
Google’s crawlers (often called bots or spiders) can only scan websites every so often. If a new website is created, or you make changes to an existing website, it takes time before these changes are reflected in the website’s search engine ranking.
And this ties into the main question that we are trying to answer: how long does it take Google to index? It also brings up other questions that are important for affiliate marketers who are trying to get their content ranked ahead of their competitors, such as:
How do I know when Google has indexed my site?
How can I make Google index my site faster?
What if Google is indexing the wrong parts of my website? How do I avoid this?
Prepare yourself to get into the weeds with this article. Search engine optimization for affiliate marketing can seem pretty complex when you are learning about it for the first time.
However, it is also very important to have a good grasp on it. It’s satisfying when your website runs like a well-oiled machine because you followed best practices, and you achieve your first top-10 ranking. We are here to help you get there!
Why Fast Indexing Matters
Getting your content indexed as frequently and as quickly as possible by Google matters because it is the final piece of the organic SEO puzzle.
Not paying attention to whether your website is being indexed properly is kind of like giving out the wrong phone number to someone at a bar. Sure, they might find another way of getting in touch with you (after all, how hard is it to find someone on Facebook or Instagram these days), but if you put in all the work to get them interested in the first place, wouldn’t you want to have something to show for it?
It’s the same thing with your website. If you put energy and time into writing SEO-friendly articles and optimizing for chosen keywords, you need to go the extra mile to make sure that your hard work is being rewarded.
In addition, you want to get your pages indexed faster so that they can become established faster. Google favors content that has been receiving traffic for a longer period of time (in fact, the average page one ranking is over two years old, according to Ahrefs).
So, make a habit of keeping your indexing game on point. It pays off in the long run!
How Long Does it Take Google to Index?
Now that you know why being indexed by Google is important, let’s talk about how long it usually takes for this to happen.
First, let’s establish something. The following estimation is made assuming that you are doing everything the right way. This includes the steps that we will touch on in the rest of the article, from installing Google Search Console all the way to promoting your content through social channels.
The answer to “how long does it take to get indexed by Google” cannot be answered with a single number.
If you are following these search engine optimization best practices, your content should be crawled and indexed by Google in about 1 to 14 days.
Sure, this is a bit of a wide range. It might make things even more confusing to mention that some content can even be indexed by Goole within a few hours of publishing (although this is less common).
But if you don’t take the necessary steps, it is likely that your content can take months to index, or it could never be indexed at all. Let’s try our very best to avoid this outcome.
Here are our top tips for improving the speed that Google can index your website, so you don’t have to sit back and wait for your site to rank.
Installing Google Search Console
First, you will need to install several of Google’s key tools to ensure that your website is indexed properly. Thankfully, this is a relatively straightforward process.
Google Analytics Setup
First of all, you will need to set up Google Analytics for your website. This is the tool that will give you a breakdown of the most important statistics for your site.
For WordPress sites, this involves creating a Google account and installing Google Analytics through a WordPress plug-in. We won’t go through every step of the process because I think that WPBeginner does a great job with their video tutorial here.
(tk. embed YouTube video)
Once you have installed Google Analytics, you will be able to view more data about what kind of organic searches are ending up on your site using Google Search Console, among many other useful things.
This should be one of your first few steps whenever you start a new website.
Google Search Console Setup
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service that monitors your site’s presence on organic search results and gives you valuable information about the organic traffic that you receive.
It tells you the things that search engines like Google would tell you about your site if they had more time.
It’s basically mission control for indexing and search engine optimization.
It also gives you a heads up when Google’s crawls uncover anything that might be hurting your organic search rankings. This is the greatest benefit of the tool in our opinion, as it is very common to see your ranking suffer from unseen on-site SEO issues.
Search Console is a little bit tougher to install than Google Analytics, but don’t fret – here is a step by step explanation to get it running in as little as ten minutes.
After going to Search Console and logging in with your Google account, you can sign in with the same email that you used to start your Google Analytics account. This will create your new account, which will link with the rest of your Google tools.
Then, you can click the “Add Property” button and type in your domain name into the “Enter Domain or Subdomain” field.
You will then be given instructions for verifying that you own the domain, which is straightforward to follow if you are using a major domain name provider like GoDaddy, NameCheap, or Google Domains. (If you aren’t using one of these providers, follow the step-by-step guide in this HubSpot blog post).
This is honestly the trickiest part of the setup, because different providers have different methods of verifying that you are the real owner of the website. We won’t go into the solution for every outcome in this article, but most difficulties can be fixed with our old friend Google. There are plenty of great YouTube tutorials out there to help you on your way as well.
Once you are able to verify ownership, you can consider this task finished. Search Console is now installed on your site, and if you have traffic, you will be able to see data on the Search Console dashboard. Pretty easy right?
Why WWW?
Here’s an easy first step that you can take to make sure that your site is being indexed correctly.
It is important to ensure that Google recognizes the correct URL for your website. Many don’t realize that Google can treat www.brandbuilders.io and brandbuilders.io as completely different domains. This eats into the search engine optimization of each of the domains and splits your organic traffic in two.
To avoid this, you can use the Search Console to inform Google which domain you prefer to use to index your site.
The old Google Se