Veriday works with advisors and enterprise marketing teams to launch advisor websites. When an advisor has launched a website, our advisor service team often gets questions about why their website isn’t showing up on Google and how quickly will Google find their website. While the excitement of seeing their website in Google search results is always nice to see, it’s important to understand that it takes time for Google to crawl a new website or a new page of a website. It also takes time for it to rank. As large as Google is and it continues to grow, it’s primary purpose is still the same: To help users find what they want on the internet.
How Google works
Google uses a special algorithm to determine search results. Google makes public some facts and factors that are part of their algorithm but the specifics are kept private. It uses automated programs, crawlers to generate search results. These crawlers look at the content on pages of a website, along with other factors, to determine how a website will rank. Google has a large index of keywords that help determine search results.
What sets Google apart in how it ranks pages is their trademark factor called PageRank which assigns web pages a relevancy score.
A Web page’s PageRank depends on a few factors:
• The frequency and location of keywords within the Web page: If the keyword appears only once within the body of a page, it will receive a low score for that keyword.
• How long the Web page has existed: People create new Web pages every day, and not all of them stick around for long. Google places more value on pages with an established history.
• The number of other Web pages that link to the page in question: Google looks at how many Web pages link to a particular site to determine its relevance.
Out of these factors, the third one is the most important. Google sees links pointing to a website as a vote, so the best way to ensure that a website gets ranked on Google is to ensure you have quality content that other sites will want to link to.
How long does it take Google to index a new website in 2019
There is no set time when Google indexes a new website. It can take anywhere from 4 days to as much as 6 months. Newer sites often take longer to index. There are many factors at play to determine the speed at which a website will be indexed and ranked on Google.
• Site popularity
• If the content is crawlable
• Overall site structure
Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm to provide the best most accurate results to the people searching. Regardless of all the changes that are made there a few key SEO factors that will remain regardless. As someone starting out with a new website, it’s important to stay focused on the factors that are known to prevent a website from ranking:
• Use short descriptive URLs for new pages being created. Pages with shorter URLs rank better—that’s according to our 2016 study of 2 MILLION keywords.
• Write a strong title tag and meta description which should include your keywords
• Title tag – The title that appears in the browser
• Meta description – Description of the website/web page that appears in Google search results
• Use only one H1 on a page with your main keyword
• Link to relevant internal and external content. Whenever a new page is publishing something new, make an effort to add internal links from relevant places on existing pages.
• Optimize your images with descriptive “alt text”
To wrap up, indexing and ranking on high on Google search results isn’t a once and done task. There isn’t a set time when a website will rank so it’s important to be patient after launching a new website or a new web page.
