If you’re building links to your website, or you’ve got somebody “doing SEO” who should be building links, how long will it take to have an effect? That’s the subject of a good article How Long Does Link Building Take to Influence Rankings? on the Moz blog.
The two ‘takeaways’ which I got from the article were these. Firstly, 10 weeks is a typical gestation period for a strong inbound link to have an impact on the position of your search result. And secondly, stronger external sites will have a far higher impact, and may do so slightly more quickly.
What do we mean by ‘stronger external sites’? The article refers to ‘DA’, which is ‘domain authority‘. This is a score developed by the Moz website which attempts to rate how well a website is ranking on search engines. You can see the Domain Authority of a site (including your own) using Open Site Explorer.
The author of the article writes: “I generally have a rule that I don’t want to spend any time or money on sites with DAs under 25. This chart shows that they’re not completely devoid of value, but be prepared for a very, very small change in rank with these guys.”
So there you have it: a way to determine sites to target for links, and an idea of when you should be expecting any impact. Don’t be impatient.