How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google

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How Soon Will Google Rank My Website

The usual answer to this burning question is ‘it depends’. Luckily, thanks to a study from marketing data company Ahrefs, we finally have a more concrete answer.

In order to determine the average age of the pages in Google Top 10 results, the team from Ahrefs took 2 million random keywords and pulled data on the Top 10 ranking pages for each of them. The results showed that the average Top 10 ranking page is 2+ years old, while those that rank at position #1 are almost 3 years old on average. In fact, only 22% of pages that currently rank in the Top 10 were created within 1 year.

The study then looked at what percentage of pages at each ranking position were less than 1 year old, and it turned out that the search engine results page (SERP) is dominated by “old“ pages.

To answer the question of how long it takes for a page to rank in Google, Ahrefs randomly selected 2 million pages that were first seen by their crawler a year ago and then tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for.

If you want to find out what they discovered, check out the comprehensive infographic below by The Website Group.

Angela Tucker

Angela Tucker has maintained the role of Lead Technical Optimizer at 1st on the List since our company was founded in 1997. She has experienced every one of Google’s algorithm updates and has the ability to review a website on a micro-level to pinpoint all the areas that could potentially be causing ranking issues. Her specific areas of expertise include Site Speed Optimization, Knowledge Graph, and Schema Markup. Learn more about Angela.