There are many good reasons to get your site indexed in search engines or specific pages before the official launch.
They include:
- You want PR people like journalists, bloggers, and influencers to find you on launch day so they know where to link and which site to share. (If you have competitors with similar names or non-competitors with similar domains, the journalist may link to the wrong site.)
- Your site needs to render and index properly to attract new customers via search engines. By being indexed before launch, you can check the cache and troubleshoot any issues. (Some spiders will do this as well, but I always prefer to use the search engine when I can.)
- Launches mean big ad spending, and you’ll want the customers you are paying to gain exposure to find you easily.
How Long Does It Take to Get Indexed by Google
According to Google Advanced SEO documentation, crawling can take anywhere from four days to four weeks.
Mueller begins with two disclaimers: Google doesn’t guarantee that all webpages will get indexed and that not everything that is indexed is shown to search users.
He continues to say that when a new page is published on the internet, it can take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to get indexed. He “suspects” that the most suitable content is indexed within a week.
Request Indexing from Google
Google Search Console offers multiple ways for website owners to notify Google of a new website and ensure that the most important pages are crawled and indexed. You can start by submitting a sitemap and creating a robots.txt file.
You can also ask Google to crawl your URLs with the URL Inspection tool. They note that indexing can take up to a week or two.
Get Links from Google Discover
One underutilized technique to get indexed is having backlinks from pages that get crawled by “discover” and “refresh.”
- Discover is Google’s new content discovery spider.
- Refresh is the bot Google uses to refresh the content within its indexes.
Once you have a blogger or website owner that will give you a backlink or two, see if they’ll log into Search Console.
In the settings area, you’ll be able to download a list of URLs Google crawls and when they crawl.