In this blog post we will go through the issue of how long it takes for a published blog post, website, article etc to appear in Google searches.
How long does it take to be indexed on Google?
Answering this question is a bit like answering how long a piece of string is - it can take minutes or weeks. Google indexes the pages that do not violate any of the rules that Google has set up. There are many elements that affect and no one knows exactly how Google's algorithms work but they are transparent with which pages have been indexed and which have not, and for what reason this has or has not happened. Before we get into what elements affect and what you can do to speed up the process, we need to go over what we mean by "indexed".
What does it mean to be indexed on Google?
What we mean by indexed is that a specific URL (web address) has been crawled by Google's algorithms and is included in Google's index of web pages when someone does a search using the Google search engine. It does not mean that you will see your own result on the first page when you Google the title of your page. It doesn't even have to be that you'll find your page in the first 10 pages of Google. Where you rank is all about ranking.
What factors affect how you are indexed on Google?
- Ease of use
An important factor for being indexed is that the pages on your website are user-friendly. For example, they should not redirect to another page or have a 404 error. There should be visible text and a clear structure on the website for Google to index the website.
- Unique content
One of the most common reasons for Google not indexing a page is that Google thinks the content on the page is copied. It may be that you have found relevant information that you want to share on your website that you have copied in.If too much of the total content from the page is copied, Goolge will not find it relevant to display and will instead display the page from which you have taken the information (this also applies to direct translations from one language to another). Google may also choose not to index one or more of your pages that contain the same content as another of your pages.
- Technical problems
In some cases, there is code on your pages that prevents Google from indexing them. This happens if, for example, there is a "noindex" meta tag on the page or if you have a robots.txt blocking the page.
- Content!
In order to succeed in being indexed on Google, the page to be indexed needs to contain some form of relevant content. It can be text, image or video. It also requires a certain amount of content to be indexed at all and be relevant for Google to show up in its search engine.There has been a lot of discussion about how much text is needed to be indexed and although there is no exact limit to this, we estimate that it takes at least 300 words for Google to find it relevant to index a specific page. It also has a big impact on how your pages rank (more on that below).
Can it be indexed faster?
Yes, it is actually possible to speed up an indexing from Google. If you have connected your website to Google Search Console, you can use that tool to request that a recently published page be indexed by typing at the top of the Google Search Console the URL of your recently published website that you are requesting that Google Index the page. In the case where there is no obvious error on the page such as a redirect or an error code, Google will add the URL to a priority queue for indexing.See the image below to see where you can type in the URL of a page to request priority indexing.
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