You probably wonder how long it takes for your backlinks to get processed by the search engine and have website rankings updated. The universal opinion used to be that it’s around three months, but with the advances in AI and algorithms in recent years it’s likely to be faster.
What do experts say?
However, the professional community seems to be split on this topic. While some SEO experts, even today, consider six months to be the effective time frame, Google Search Documentation states reindexing a page “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”. Also keep in mind that Googlebot has a daily unspecified limit on the number of pages it crawls. On top of that, Google’s Webmaster Trend Analyst John Mueller says it’s a matter of approximately one month for a website to have its ranking updated.
Is there a definite answer to the question? No, and even in-depth studies showed there’s no way to produce time estimates for the ranking process. And considering the latest Google Update ranking speed might change in either direction.
So what should I do?
It’s hard to make an accurate assessment whether a link or even a batch of links contributed to your ranking. If your approach to link building is not well organized, and publications/links are deployed unevenly over a long stretch of time you won’t be able to gauge the effect correctly. That’s why it is important to prepare a link building strategy. Think through all the possible channels, make a content plan for guest contributions and start implementing it. Prioritizing content creation is the best way to guarantee quality results. Unique quality content tends to yield good traffic, provided you choose a relevant high authority website and negotiate a publication.
Conclusion
Your best bet is to monitor your page rank as well as your backlink growth, while keeping tabs on when you publish new content/links. Other than that we can recommend a way to max out the effect: make sure that with your website you’re following Google’s quality guidelines – it’s a great baseline for boosting your website ranking potential.
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