How Long Does Google Take to Index New Sites?

Google, Bing and other search engines have different schedules for how long it takes for them to index new websites.

Publishers of new websites naturally want to see their sites appear in search engines as soon as possible.

Getting Google, Bing and other search engines to index a new site is not immediate. Instead, the process can take anywhere from days to weeks. Some people have claimed that Google took months to index their new websites.

Either way, publishers need some patience in getting their sites to start appearing in search engines. They also can take a few important steps in making the process go faster.

Google Indexing of New Site

This company published a six-page microsite as a small project. It was an experiment on the impact of microsites on backlinks and search engine response to keyword domains. A keyword domain is a domain name with some of the same words that searchers use when they visit search engines.

Google indexed the site in less than a week. First it indexed just the homepage. The page did not appear on any of the first 10 pages in search results for the domain name. Then Google indexed each of the next five pages, one at a time.

After a few more days, the pages began to appear in the first 10 pages of Google search results for the related keywords.

For the record, it takes much more effort that just a keyword domain to get decent rankings for a microsite. Those efforts include more content and various marketing efforts such as social media and backlinks.

But the response time by Google for such a small site is an example of how quickly that search engine indexes a new site.

Bing Indexing of New Site

Two weeks after the launch, Bing had still not indexed the new microsite. Bing search traffic is much lower than Google for many sites, and the search engine has little respect for smaller sites.

Still, any site with ambitious goals will want to get indexed by Bing as soon as possible. Bing also provides the same results for Yahoo, so the two sites in combination can make a meaningful difference in total audience numbers.

Although Bing hasn’t indexed the microsite yet, it did index a previous microsite project. It just takes time.

How to Improve Indexing of a New Site

Bing and Google both offer tools that improve the chances for quicker indexing and higher rankings for new sites.

The Bing product is called Webmaster Tools, and the Google product is named “Search Console”. Publishers can find both tools by using those search terms on their respective sites.

The tools allow webmasters to create accounts that include sitemaps, ranking reports, HTML suggestions and other features that improve site performance.

Publishers should set up accounts for their sites as soon as possible after launching them. The accounts will likely speed up the indexing process.