How long is a piece of string? The honest answer is that it depends.
If you’ve recently made changes to your website, whether that be updating a meta description, rewriting page content or changing a title tag, you might expect Google to notice these updates straight away.
In reality, this is not always the case, as Google doesn’t always pick up these changes immediately.
In fact, it can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks for Google to notice changes made to a website and show the updated version in search results.
This is because Google has limited resources available to crawl and index a website. Google doesn’t check every website every day – instead, it decides when to come back based on several different factors.
This can include how often your website is updated, and how easy it is for Google to understand.
This process involves one of Google’s crawl bots visiting your site, reading through its content and discovering these updates and deciding whether those changes should be added to their index.
Google’s index is a database holding saved versions of web pages that Google has crawled and indexed. When someone performs a search, Google searches its index and returns the pages that it believes are the most relevant to the user’s query.
When you update a page, Google needs to visit that page again, see the changes and update the version saved in its index. Until that happens, Google may still show the older version of the page in search results.
Once Google has seen and processed the updated page, your changes can start to appear.
As a general guide, the timeline below shows roughly how long it can take for Google to show changes made to a website:
- Small changes to text typically appear within a few hours to a few days.
- Adding new pages or making larger website changes can usually take up to two weeks to show properly in Google’s search results.
- Changes that affect where your website ranks can often take between a few weeks to a few months. This is because Google needs time to review the updated page and compare it with other pages in the search results to decide where it should appropriately rank.
There are a few ways you can try and speed up the process, including manually submitting the URL of your updated page into Google Search Console to request indexing and ensuring that your sitemap is up to date and is regularly submitted to Search Console.
Need help ensuring that your website is being discovered, indexed and shown to the relevant audience in search results? Reach out to our team of experts at Engage Web to find out more today.
