How long does it take Google to index and cache a new website and how to speed up the process
Published February 01, 2021 by Danny Moran
Table of Contents
Introduction
You’ve just finished designing your brand new website and hit publish button. You head over to Google and enter your domain name only to get told your search did not match any documents. The reason for this is that Google is unaware of your website and has yet to crawl over your web pages and index it all. If you follow the steps in this post, you will have your website appearing in Google searches in under 7 days.
How do you tell Google where my website is?
So, how do you tell Google to go to your website and start listing it in search results, and how long until it starts to appear? The easiest way to tell Google about your website is to submit your Sitemap. The fastest way to do this is to “ping them” the Sitemap for your website.
To “Ping” Google your Sitemap, copy and edit the below link and edit the text that is in bold to your own domain. Once you go to your version of the URL, you will see “Sitemap Notification Received”
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.dannymoran.com/sitemap.xml
How long will it take to start appearing in Google search results?
In my personal experience, after submitting over 20 websites, it has never taken over 6 days since submitting the Sitemap to Google for the submitted website to start appearing. Although the main website will start to appear in under 1 week it can take months for individual web pages to appear and rank correctly when people are searching for keywords in your posts.
How can I check if my website is appearing in Google search results?
It’s easy to check, however, if you just search for your domain name, it’s unlikely to appear in the first few pages as the website is so new. To find out exactly what pages Google is indexing you have to do an advanced search. Go to the below link or copy the below search term and change the text that is in bold to the full URL of your website. As soon as Google has indexed your website you will start seeing web pages appear. If it says your search did not match any documents then, unfortunately, you will have to wait a little bit longer.
Google Search Central (formerly Webmasters)
Another way of getting Google to index your website is to sign up to the Google Search Central portal and register your website. It takes slightly longer to do this method however once you register there are additional benefits such as Google Analytics. Both methods take the same amount of time, once the website has been submitted, for your website to start appearing in search results.
Linking to your website
A method that I have read about multiple times but never tried is linking to your website from multiple other sources. The easiest way to do this is from social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Most of these websites have options to specify your website on your profile, as well as make a post notifying your friends and followers about your new website. I’m not sure if this will speed up the process of getting your website listed however I can guarantee that it won’t hurt it.