It can take Google anywhere from a few hours to at least a few weeks to ‘update’ your site. What does that mean? Google has to re-crawl your website to see what pages and its content have been added, removed or changed. It can then index indexable pages before it decides if and where to rank them.
There are different factors and Google algorithms that come into play here. We’ll take a basic look at what happens.
So when you make a change on your site, such as uploading new content, it’s quite unlikely that Google will pick it up within minutes and you’ll suddenly be ranking.
Googlebot is a very technical system and is known as a ‘spider’ in the marketing world. It accesses a file called a ‘robots.txt’ file, should you have one set up on your site. This file indicates to Google exactly which pages you want to allow access to so it can crawl those pages.
Top tip! Make sure your robots.txt file is set up correctly, otherwise you could risk disallowing your whole site; that means not letting Google see any of your pages.
Next, Google sends information back to its database, or ‘index’, and it decides the relevance and quality of each page. The Google index is essentially a huge list of every single page the search engine is aware exists.
Then, it ranks accordingly, with the Webmaster guidelines in mind.
You can optimise your website to be Google-friendly by doing the following.
1. Create a clear and comprehensive website navigation - Google doesn’t like messy, ugly URLs in an illogical manner
2. Implement a suitable, correct robots.txt file - to help avoid wasting crawl budget
3. Upload really good, indexable pages and content - generally avoid thin or duplicate content
4. Use plain, English language in your URLs - to not overcomplicate your site to Googlebot
5. Publish great content regularly - if Google sees you’re an active site, it can index it more often
6. Check your internal linking strategy - ensure your top priority pages have more optimised internal links than your lower priority pages
7. Remove ‘nofollow’ links from your internal links - a ‘nofollow’ tells Google you don’t trust that domain, so you want your links to be ‘dofollow’
8. Build natural, top quality backlinks to your priority pages - Google will notice which pages are the ‘best’ if other great websites are linking to it
9. Avoid having problem pages set to indexable - broken, confirmation or checkout pages shouldn’t be being indexed (and broken ones should be fixed!)
10. Canonicalise your pages correctly - if you’ve got hundreds of faceted product pages but you haven’t canonicalised them correctly to the main product page, Google won’t know which page you want to rank
Set up Google Analytics & Google Search Console. These are both tools belonging to Google.
Google Analytics allows you to see all of the available data from Google with regards to how your website has performed.
Google Search Console is a way of checking for problems including coverage, sitemap and mobile friendly issues. It also enables you to check how you’re performing organically, including data on click through rates.
There are other tools like Google’s Fetch and Render and the functionality to submit your sitemap through Search Console.
Submitting your sitemap is one of the most crucial parts of the process, because that’s a list of your website’s pages that you want Googlebot to crawl and index. If you don’t allow the search engine access, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Now you’re a little more clued up on how long it takes Google to update SEO. But if you have questions about organic search or how the search engine works, come and have a chat with us; we’re a friendly bunch with over 40 years of experience in digital marketing.
