“My site went live 2 weeks ago but I cannot find it on Google, how come?”
This is one of the most common questions that we receive from owners of new websites.
In order to be found on Google, your site needs to be crawled and indexed by the Google Crawler. The amount of time that this process takes depends on several factors such as traffic volume or how new a website is.
Getting a website crawled and indexed by Google in 2022 is far more complicated than it was five or six years ago. Just think about those numbers: The latest data suggests over 200 million active websites globally, and Google includes more than 55 billion web pages in its index. As you can see the Google crawler is busy and therefore it can take some time until it visits your site!
How Long Will It Take Google to Index My Site?
The size and complexity of your site are two of the main deciding factors on how long it will take. Smaller websites can be indexed in 4-days to 6-weeks, while larger sites can take more than 6-months to be completely indexed by Google.
The more unique and relevant your website is, the faster it will be crawled by Google. Or in other words, the larger and the more similar content is across various web pages of the same site (think: online shops with thousands of similar pages), the longer it will take Google to crawl and index it.
Indexing time by website size
- Small website (less than 100 pages) – 4- days to 6-weeks
- Medium websites (up to 1,000 pages) – 14-days to 12-weeks
- Large websites (1,000 pages) – 1-month to 6-months
- Extra large websites (100,000+ pages) – 6-months+
These figures are for indicative purposes only! The indexing time for your website will depend largely on the technical factors, content quality and industry in which you operate.
How Can I Check if My Site Has Been Indexed?
There is an easy way to check this. Go to Google and search “site:yourdomain.com”. In case your site has been indexed you will see a list of results similar to the one for digitalon.com.au in the screenshot below:
Otherwise, it will look more like this, Google hasn’t found your site yet, and there are no results:
What Can I Do To Get It Indexed?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear answer to this question.
It is a bit annoying but dealing with Google is never quick and easy and there is no direct way to get indexing done faster.
However, in recent years, marketers have found a few tactics that seem to influence the process positively.
- Google Search Console
Create an account and submit your Sitemap. Let us know if you need help with this! - Create or update your Google Business Profile with the new website details.
- In case you have other older, websites that have ranked pages, create a link from the old one to the new one. This is also called backlink building. And signals to Google that your new website is valuable.
- Get other sites and influencers to link to your page. Same principle here.
- Regularly publish new content on your website. The best way to do this is through a blog. Let us know if you would like us to extend your site with this feature.
For your information, websites with a blog get an average of 434% more indexed pages. - Install Google Analytics: This is one more way to tell Google to look at your site. And it also helps you to understand how your visitors interact with your website.
As you can see a lot of these points point back to Google and the different ways how your website can be detected by Google.
And here is a free hint: When creating your Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics Account, make sure to use the same Gmail Account. This ensures that the different accounts can talk to each other and everything is under the same hood.
If you need further assistance with creating and linking these accounts and your website please contact us!
