Is anybody else finding that it seems to be taking a lot longer these days for Google to index a site, then to start ranking decently?
In the past I found a site would generally be indexed in a couple days, then there would be a dance up and down the rankings for a few weeks before you had a decent idea of what might need to be changed. From there changes were generally reflected in a couple of days with good results.
Starting about six months ago it suddenly seemed to take a very long time for sites to even be indexed and then appearing low in the rankings, even when there is relatively little competition. They seem to gradually climb over a period of several months, whether I make changes or not.
All of this has made it rather difficult to assess how changes are affecting the rankings, whether it is Seo based or general changes in content. I have wondered if this might be deliberate on their part.
Yes I’ve done that, though in the past it was never really needed to add the sitemap in the webmaster console just to be indexed.
I had one site that wasn’t indexed at all after a month, despite some good backlinks and it didn’t make a lot of sense. It only appeared in the rankings about two weeks after it was added to the console as a website with a sitemap.
The sites do eventually seem to rank reasonably well, but it’s frustratingly slow nowadays and I’ve seen it with more than one site. This makes it difficult dealing with clients when a site goes live and it’s sitting there on page 11 for three months far behind less relevant websites.
Part of the reason I am thinking about this is that I am building a website for myself on a new domain and wondering how long all of this will take before it starts to see good levels of search traffic.
I can usually get a site indexed in a couple of days, if there’s some decent quality inbound links. But ranking is taking way way longer than previous years.
I uploaded a small holding site yesterday that is in the Google search console and has a few backlinks, so I am curios to see how long it will take before Google indexes it. The hope is that this will at least give me a head start before the full site goes live.
A lot of the time I am dealing with clients that stare at me blankly when I talk about incoming links from other sites and naively think that simply building the site should be enough to have them at the top of Google at no extra cost inside a week. That can certainly be a problem now…
The bigger issue though is that it’s taking much longer to rank, just as you seem to be finding. Going back a year ago and I could typically have a small new site for a local area on page one inside a few weeks, whereas now it seems to be taking several months.
This first became evident around six months ago and it also seems like updates to sites are very slow to be reflected in Googles search results as well.
I can at least see that sites eventually make their way up the rankings, nevertheless this is making it very difficult to see quick results from changes like before.