I’ve been experimenting and doing some testing recently to try to figure out how long it takes to get “credit” for new links to your site. It appears that the organic rankings credit comes about 5 days after you get a new link to a website.
To verify some of my recent findings, I worked on a website whose “PageRank” was, as reported by the Google Toolbar, a PageRank zero. The site is several years old, has content on it, but really hasn’t been optimized properly. The pages on the site were indexed, but there was virtually no traffic to the site except for the occasional “type-in”. This site had 307 pageviews total during the month of January 2007.
To continue with the test to verify my recent findings, I secured the equivalent of what would be a PR9 and a PR8 link to one of the interior pages of the site (not the home page). At the same time, I added additional pages to the site with unique content over a period of about a week, and fixed the navigation on the site so it can get crawled properly. The verdict?
Five days after securing the new PR9 and PR8 links to one page on the site, the traffic started flow as a result of better organic search engine rankings. After five days (the first five days of the month of February 2007), there are about 14000 pageviews on the site. Granted, there’s not a huge amount of traffic to the site after five days, but the entire site is crawled and the pages on the site that “should be” ranking well are ranking well in the Google search results. The topic of the site is in a pretty specific niche, so I’m not expecting hundreds of thousands of pageviews on the site.
Many people have been wondering (and even I’ve been wondering) how long it takes to see an organic ranking effect on getting some new links to the site. From what I can tell, it takes about 5 days right now in order to see any effects of getting new links.
