When it comes to getting your new content indexed by Google, quality is of the most important aspects of it. Yet, when it comes down to Google indexing content, it can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.
Getting Your New Content Indexed by Google
How long will it take for Google to index my content? This is a common question asked of SEO professionals. And, the common answer given is often the hardest to hear. It depends.
According to John Mueller, a Google search relations representative, posted a new video in the #AskGooglebot series answering the question: how long does SEO take for new pages? Well, “it depends,” says John Mueller, but he did dig a bit deeper into providing a more precise answer.
How Long Does it Take to Index Content?
In this case, it really does depend. It can take “several hours to several weeks” for Google to index new content (or updated content), according to John Mueller. However, it can sometimes take a bit longer due to either one or more technical issues affecting the crawlability of your website or it could just be that GoogleBot is busy with other tasks, such as indexing other websites it deems to be more important.
Basically, it varies on how long it will take for Google to index new (or updated) content. For example, we know that breaking news sites can be indexed within minutes by Google. You’ll easily see this in search results.
Indexing Does NOT = Search Engine Rankings
Although your website may be indexed by Google, it does not guarantee you that your indexed web pages will rank. Google issued a disclaimer about this along the lines of saying of saying that forcing something to be indexed does not mean that the web page will be shown in the top of Google’s search results.
Google Does NOT Guarantee They Will Index You
Google does not guarantee that they will index your content (or all the content on the web). Fun fact, Google does not index a lot of content that is on the internet, and no other search engine does this either, i.e. BING & YAHOO. However, Google tries to avoid indexing duplicate content, mirror images of the same content, useless content, along with longer URLs that have a lot of URL parameters that have no usefulness to them.
How to Speed Up Indexing New Content
Google did list out a few ways to speed up indexing, and some of these tactics include;
- Improve Page Speed: prevent server overload by speeding up your server
- Increase Internal Linking: Link to new pages within your website prominently, maybe link those pages from your home page
- Avoid using unnecessary URLs: get rid of infinite calendar URLs and filters for category pages
- Submit URLs: From XML sitemap files to the URL inspection tool for individual URLs
- Share on Social: Sharing your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, etc. can help get your content crawled & indexed faster
Quality Content is Important for Indexing
The most important thing here is to make sure your site is high quality so Google prioritizes indexing and hopefully ranking your content above lower quality websites. Write content that people actually have an interest in. Keep it clear, concise, and credible. Remember the importance of E-A-T SEO in accordance to Google’s Search Quality Guidelines too. Quality content should always be the focus over quantity and/or thin content, let alone just producing content for the sake of artificial KPIs like publishing X amount of blog posts per day or week.
Great content will get higher user engagement and will have a higher probability of being shared throughout social media and linked to more often from bloggers, news publishers, and other sites. This is great for natural link building that helps SEO, yet can also help Google find, crawl, index, and rank your content much faster, while also discovering and ranking other website content of yours too.
If your website could use a lift in organic traffic for all the content you publish or have questions about content marketing & SEO, feel free to contact us today to discuss how we might be able to best help accelerate your search engine visibility & compound traffic growth via our tier-1 SEO services for startups, SMBs, and enterprise brands.
