Google Indexes Blog Posts in Under Five Minutes
Today I am at a conference called “Search Engine Marketing Made Simple,” where I’ll be discussing business blogging.
I’d like to share with you an important lesson I learned this morning. The lesson is: Google indexes blog posts incredibly fast. And that’s yet another good reason to write a blog for your business.
Geoff Karcher, owner of the Karcher Group which is putting on today’s conference. put up a blog post this morning as an experiment. He wrote the post about the phrase “search engine marketing made simple experiment.”
The goal was to see how quickly that post would be indexed and rank for that phrase.
I suspected it would take very little time for Geoff’s blog post to be indexed in Google. But I was thinking a day or two.
But it was a lot faster! It took just 4 minutes. Four minutes from publishing a blog post, to appearing in Google’s index. Geoff published his post about an hour ago.
Later during our working lunch session we will be discussing the experiment.
I think if it proves nothing else, it demonstrates how having a business blog in your site can help you get indexed in the search engines incredibly fast.
March 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
On a related note, I discussed this very topic with my family just a couple of weeks ago.
I remarked that my new posts were listed in Google Reader and shared with the world within (no joke) 15 seconds of my clicking the Publish button. Then I mentioned that it takes some organizations days or weeks to share important information, even internally.
Blogging really is an incredibly powerful communication tool.
March 25th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Id agree with that observation. I blogged about Eastercon and Orbital2008 yesterday afternoon and by this morning I was seeing search engine results of people coming to my site because they were searching Google for those words. Google likes Content Management Systems that are open and smart and Google friendly I guess.
March 25th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I, too, have experienced similiar results - but within minutes. . .that’s pretty impressive. Blogging has far reaching benefits, that’s for sure. And this is just another example of how beneficial blogging can be for business.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
That is really fast, I just assumed it would take hours at least. Now I understand why blogs are fast becoming a great resource for business exposure.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I can vouch for this speed too … we’ve had it take over a month to get some of the products we sell coming up in Google, but we started a business blog around the middle of January and most times the blog posts start appearing in Google within hours … amazing!
March 25th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Anita - Great post and awesome information today! I too, attended this SEM session and enjoyed all facets. Being a beginner blogger, your material on that topic was very helpful! Good meeting you!
March 25th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
[…] Worpress 2.5 that is coming out, because I wanted to test the reaction time of Google. According to this post it can be indexed in less than 5 […]
March 25th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
The indexing of new blog content is astonishingly fast, isn’t it?
Agreed 100% with the real benefits of this. And some bloggers are making a killing off watching what the hot search trends are, blogging about those topics, getting search traffic, then making money when people click on the ads on their blog.
But as an SEO-type guy, I should add this for your readers benefit: over time, many of those quick and high rankings you have will fade away as the blog post eventually gets treated the same as any other content would. In other words, quite often a blog post will rank highly even for a competitive term simply because of the freshness of the content (and it helps when the search term is deemed to require fresh content). But as the blog post loses its freshness, it will slip down and eventually settle into where it really belongs based on all the traditional SEO factors (trust, authority, inbound links, etc.).
Hope this helps.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Like Amanda, I also assumed it would take hours—to my surprise—just minutes. Very impressive and a great post here.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I agree. I have noticed blogs get indexed faster in Google Reader. A good development for faster and reliable communication.
March 26th, 2008 at 8:21 am
iam suprised that after creating a blog it will be indexed within 5mins at google i think i dont believe if i want to then i should create a blog and try it out
March 26th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Interesting post.
Not surprised that the post got indexed so quickly.
If he has a blog that is crawled frequently by the google bots, then new posts will get indexed pretty quickly
You may find that the same does not apply with a brand new blog.
With these, indexing may take a few days in the first instance
webmaster
http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com
March 26th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Matt,
You’re definitely correct, these kinds of rankings often slip quickly as more relevant “fresh” content is added to various sites. It’s certainly not a long term approach to gaining specific rankings. Also keep in mind that these are very non-competitive phrases. Not that it couldn’t happen with competitive ones, but our goal was just to try and demonstrate just how fast Google is able to locate, index and rank content.
March 29th, 2008 at 4:49 am
I would have expected his posting to be indexed quickly but NOT THAT QUICK! I must get working on a blog for my website. It’s obviously a competitive advantage for any website owner. To be indexed in a day would be extremely useful. Thanks for sharing these findings.
March 29th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Hi Christina,
Have you tried uploading your products through Google Base? It’s a way to get products into the “Shopping” section of Google. http://base.google.com.
I’d be curious to hear how fast Google Base works.
If anyone has had exerience with Google Base, please feel free to share your “speed” stories.
Anita