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JOHN MUELLER: Hi, everyone.
And welcome back to another episode of "AskGooglebot."
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 home page, 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 site map 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 a 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 "AskGooglebot."
Don't forget to subscribe to see the next episodes.
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