Why Does Link Building Take So Long to Work?

When you see a blog post or article that talks about how to get links, it typically has a section on the process of link building.

It is common for people who are new to SEO and content marketing to believe that their job is done after they have created the content because “links will come naturally.”

However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In this article, we’ll talk about why link building takes so long to work and give you some tips on speeding up your success.

It Can Take a Long Time to Create Epic Content

It can take a lot of work to create the kind of content that gets shared and linked.

This is because you need to spend time researching, writing, editing, promoting your post, and doing all kinds of other tasks before people start sharing it with others on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If you want long-term results from these efforts as well as links for SEO purposes (which we’ll discuss more in just a bit), then link building itself isn’t enough — you also have to prepare yourself for what comes next: waiting.

You will continue working hard after publishing your blog post or article by continuing to promote it over time so that new visitors find their way back to your site organically via search.

Link Building

Indexing Content is Also Time-Consuming

In addition to getting people to share your content, you also have to get the search engines themselves – Google, Bing, and Yahoo! – to index it.

Search engine spiders or crawlers crawl a website’s pages in order for webmasters and SEOs to see what they look like from an algorithmic perspective.

You can help this process along by submitting sitemaps as well as making sure any links back from other sites are not no-followed which tells their respective web servers that these links should be ignored when calculating page rank (you don’t want anyone passing link juice through them).

The problem is that all of the crawling’s aren’t instantaneous — some websites report seeing results within minutes while others can take up to a month or more.

This means you will be waiting for a while before search engine spiders come across your new content and index it.

Link building is Still the Most Important Aspect of SEO

All of the waiting is worth it, though.

After your content has been indexed by search engines and you have submitted any new sitemaps, links to your pages on other websites are still very important for SEO purposes (in addition to social engagement).

In fact, links are still the number one ranking factor in SEO.

Yes, you have to wait patiently as search engine spiders crawl your new content and index it for people who use Google or other search engines on a daily basis, but waiting is nothing compared to all of the work that goes into creating epic blog posts and articles.