Google tells how long it may take to re-rank a website

You find issues with your website. You make the necessary changes, update the website, and wait for Google to improve your website’s search rankings.

And sometimes you wait for months, but nothing happens.

Does this sound familiar?

It can be frustrating because we do not know how long it takes Google to evaluate the changes we make and then re-rank the website.

Timeframe

The good news is that now we have some idea of the timeframe.

Google’s John Mueller recently shared insights on how long it takes Google to re-rank a site.

During a recent Google SEO Office Hours hangout, someone asked John Mueller how long it usually takes:

“Could you please let me know how much time it [for Google to take major changes in a website into account and re-rank the site] takes?”

John responded with: “How long that takes … yeah, it’s hard to say … It’s really hard to say.”

John further elaborated and suggested that there are two steps:

• The first step is to crawl the content.  The amount of time it takes to crawl depends on the scope of the changes.
• The second step is to then analyze the changes made and re-rank the website accordingly.

How Signifcant Were The Changes To Your Site?

John then added:

“It’s like, on the one hand, we have to re-crawl the content… like if you make significant changes on your website we have to re-crawl that.

And to re-crawl that across a larger site that can take a bit of time, especially if you make bigger changes like across everything if you change the structure of your website.

I would assume something like that, just purely from a technical point of view would take… I don’t know… maybe a month.”

He further added:

“And for understanding the quality changes overall, I would see that as something where it probably takes a few months on our side to actually understand that this website has significantly changed.

So not something that you can fix in a week. It’s probably more like… I don’t know… three, four months, something like that, if you make significant quality changes.”

Conclusion

So now we know.

Depending on the scope of your website and changes made, it may take a few months for Google to crawl the website, analyze the steps taken to improve the quality issues, and re-rank the website in the SERPs.

Moreover, the way John answered this question suggested that this is a generalized answer. Specific situations may follow a slightly different timeline.