How long did it take for your new website to be indexed by search engines

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Why isn't my website in Google search results?

I have added my website to the webmaster tools of some major search engines already, and supplied the sitemap for the website.

I have been waiting for exactly 3 weeks now and still no data in the webmaster tools.

I have also did some link building, and the click-trough link to my website could be found in the search results from day one.

How long did it take for your website to get indexed? And why does is take so long?

Solution 1

There is no official rule as to how long it takes. I've heard anywhere from "instantly" to "a few months later". There are many variables such as how many others are linking to you (and how important they are), and how relevant is your content, and how often does your site get updated. Also, I tend to think some of the spiders kind of "do the rounds" and you may get lucky and be one of the early sites it indexes, or unlucky and not get indexed till the end.

Don't forget, the internets is a big place...

When I first launched my blog, the first post didn't get indexed for maybe a few weeks. Then once I started posting more often, my site got crawled more often. When I'm busy and don't post much, the crawling slows down as well.

Solution 2

Put a googlewhack (statistically unlikely phrase like "jellified monkey shoes" or "insanitary curmudgeons") in your site somewhere and test if you have been indexed by searching for it.

Remember that Google have highly opaque logic about what search results they return, so you are playing a guessing game in trying to get into their search results.

Solution 3

I think about 48 to 72 hours for some sites - and probably all less than 1 week. I usually announce any new websites on a blog or friend's blog that I know is crawled and it doesn't take long.

Recently I had a problem where although my robots.txt file said:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

I didn't realise that I had a Wordpress plugin that was inserting a META tag on each page instructing robots to no-follow. The Google webmaster help forum was very helpful (and quick) to find my oversight I hadn't found in weeks.

Comments

[David Z]

3 weeks sounds unusually long... I don't have any concrete data on hand but I'm pretty sure Google (for instance) picks up on changes to my sites much quicker than that.

[nedruod]

Are you seeing any problems reported in webmaster tools?

[Saif Bechan]

I did not see any any data in none of the webmaster tools, so no problems either. The funny thing is the day after I posted this question the website got indexed. Still not everything is indexed but there is some data available already, something like 70%. So for those of you who found 3 weeks unusual, now you know, it can happen. Weird coincidence!

[ghickman]

I've asked a question on stackoverflow.com, then had the question show up in Google's search results five minutes later.

[Dan Diplo]

Very popular sites like Stackoverflow are crawled much more often than common-or-garden sites. Plus John Skeet personally adds each new question to the index - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/20171/…

[Saif Bechan]

Yes I have notices that the questions pop up on google almost instantly.

[Saif Bechan]

I did the check also every day or so, but there were no results.

[Saif Bechan]

The relevance issue you stated could be the case, because the content I have on the website is not that new to the web. It's all content that is out there already somewhere with slight variations.