How long does it take for my site to appear in search engines?

Most search engines take weeks if not months to actually visit and index your webpages. The process begins when you first submit your pages to the date when a search engine begins crawling. When you submit your site to a search engine, typically the search engine will add your address to its "Queued Database" of sites to visit. On a later date, typically during late hours when there is not much usage, the search engine will begin crawling the queued list of sites and indexing them into their live database. Most search engines only do their indexing for a few hours per day and as such, this can result in a delay of several weeks between submission time and the time your site appears in search engines.

Although every search engine has different setups, your site should take anywhere between 2-6 weeks to appear live in their databases, with the exception of Altavista which takes only 48-72 hours to update. Our Search Engine Guide covers a section in which we cover average submission time on each search engine reviewed. You may take a look there to get a better understanding of the duration needed per search engine.

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