Hi everyone, I’m curious how long new backlinks usually take to show any real effect now. Let’s say the links are already live, the pages with the links are indexed, and the sites look normal: relevant topic, some organic traffic, not too many outbound links. Do you usually see any movement in a few weeks, or does it take months now? I’m also wondering if there is a difference between links from fresh articles and links from older indexed pages. From your experience, which ones start working faster? Would be interesting to hear how you guys check if a backlink is actually helping or if it was just a waste of money
There's not an absolute answer to that question. There are two steps you must understand : 1. Google takes 1, 2 or more weeks to crawl the site where you put your backlink and index it/them. 2. Google takes even more time to give you it's benefits and sometimes it can take several weeks. Now, there's something else to take into consideration. Google can give you SEO juice, but can also decide to not give you anything. I was listening to a podcast some time ago where someone bought an expensive backlink but got no benefits from it after several weeks. This proves that no one fully understands Google algorithm and the way it chooses to give importance to a backlink/domain rather than another one.
From what I’ve seen, it’s kind of a two phase thing. If the page is already indexed and gets crawled regularly, you’ll usually see it picked up within a week or two. But actual movement in rankings can take a lot longer, sometimes 3 to 8 weeks, sometimes more depending on competition.