How Long Does A Backlink Take To Impact Rankings?

A common question asked by new clients is “how long does it take for a new backlink to translate to higher rankings?”

This is a question that can not be easily answered because the algorithm is too complex and dynamic.

There are several factors at play.

1. How search engines currently view your site

2. How search engines view the link

3. What competitors are doing

4. A random variable to limit the transparency so SEO’s cannot game the system too easily.

How Long Does It Take For Backlinks To Take Effect

How search engines view your site

A site that has been penalized (yes your site can be penalized without Google sending a warning in search console) or is new or is not well categorized in the search engine’s eyes will take longer to respond to a backlink. Search engines are after all cautious creatures and they tend to preference sites that they know and like. Like people, search engines trust sites more that they are more familiar with so generally older sites and sites with a predictable and steady quality backlink history will be favored over sites that do not.

There are several clever tricks that sites can do to manipulate SEO. For instance, simply redirecting their content to an alternative unrelated site to cash in on lead generation. Yes, this type of activity while against policies goes on frequently. Generally, well-established sites are less likely to engage in risky behavior as.. they have more to lose by doing so.

Also where you sit plays a factor. It’s often much more difficult to go from position 5 to position 4 than it is to go from position 22 to position 11. This is by virtue that the top sites are concentrated at the top and search engines don’t like to mess too much with sites they know are catering to their searchers.

Also, the SERPs have ways to test the quality of a page before increasing its rankings. A backlink is a sign that this page or site is worth noticing, however search engines can sometimes take a cautious approach. They may feature a site they think could be ok on page 1 for say 1 in 100 visitors.. and check the click-through rate and time on site (if you are using Google Analytics). If your page passes such a test they would then make the position move more permanent, if not, it’s likely to still increase however not as much as it would otherwise. Depending on the volume of the keyword, these tests take time to run, hence the time delay. It’s hard to know exactly how often this occurs but safe to say the dynamism of how algorithms work is a factor against immediacy.

How search engines view the link

I could list 50 factors at a minimum that impact how a link is viewed. The DA of the referring site is often the most widely spruiked however is fraught with danger. We like to look at the number of outbound links a site has relative to its DA as well as what keywords a site is ranking for and the quality of the sites it links out to, and also how that site got its DA (as it can be manipulated).. Again there are no hard and fast rules here and that is where SEO borders on an art-form – as multiple competing factors needs to be balance for selecting the right placement.

The content we are finding is taking an increasingly important role in the determination of the quality of the link. It should be at a level understandable by an 8-year-old – that is what search engine crawlers prefer. This can be challenging when writing on more technical topics so it is ok to depart from that do a degree. It should be rich in related keywords at the right ratio (we keep secret what we believe those percentages should be) and also should link to the right authoritative sites. The main rule of thumb is how long is someone likely to read this article for, and often the substantive content plays a secondary role. For instance, I recently came across an article where every 5th or so word featured a superfluous letter in the word. One would think that that would turn readers off (clearly it does not leave a good impression) however that page ranked very well and can only surmise this is because other pages it competed with were by nature articles people just scanned to find quick information and left fairly quickly and the peculiar use of grammar caused visitors to stay hence helping the session time. The time a visitor is on your site plays a big factor in SEO.

With guest posts, we are not looking per se at ranking the guest post however these types of metrics play a part in how the backlinks within a post are treated and assessed.

On a basic level, links in quality content related to your site where the link is surrounded by keywords (2-3 sentences away) that other sites in your niche rank for is highly important. Try to get your keyword in the headers and aim to provide content that people will want to read. Content length helps more as a safeguard towards being viewed as low quality. The site should have a low spam score and higher DA the better (given all other factors being equal)

Google themselves have a guide on what makes a quality link

Link Velocity Effects On Backlinks

Link velocity also plays a big part. Link velocity is the number of links gained over time for a site on a per month basis. If your number of links is a massive departure from your previous link building efforts this is cause for search engines to not weigh the links as they should. This is more to effect than timing but gives an idea that no amount of time will help if you are simply building dozens upon dozens of links a month. This leaves site owners in a tricky position as they transit from a low-quality bulk link strategy to a higher quality approach. Fair to say if you build no more than 5-10 links in your first 2 months when transitioning and grow from there then you should be ok. In terms of should you keep up low-quality link building in this transitioning phase, more on that later.