How Much Time will Link Building take to Impact My Website Rankings?

This is a very important question and one for which there is no direct answer. The exact time it takes to see the results of your link building efforts depends on many different factors. At the same time, if you’re a digital marketing professional pitching your link building services to potential clients, then you would want to be able to give some kind of timeframe for the client to witness the impact of your link building efforts.

Fact of the matter is that a new backlink doesn’t immediately impact ranking. Over time, series of online marketing activities may contribute toward the net traffic increase, making it harder to gauge the results of your link building campaign. A number of on-page changes to the website during this period may also impact the results that you get.

Kristina Kledzik of moz.com set out to answer this difficult question. She had the unique advantage of working with a humongous website that had well over 200,000 indexed pages, of which she carefully selected a sample that didn’t undergo too many on-page changes to be able to affect the results significantly.

Link Building Study - Key Findings

Some interesting findings of her study include the following:

• It takes on average 10 weeks in order to see 1 rank jump.

• Greater number of links tends to have a more quicker effect on the score.

• While an individual link may only cause a small-to-medium impact initially, but overtime that impact becomes stronger.

• Adding many links at once won’t give you faster results, but you will witness greater results over time.

• The lower a webpage’s rank, the greater the impact of an individual backlink.

• Links from websites with higher domain authority (DA) tend to have a greater impact on the score.

• Kristina recommends to avoid sites with DA below 25, though I optionally keep such websites for my tier 2 link building. It also helps to diversify links from high quality DA sites with those having low to average DA.

• Links from websites with higher DA tend to register faster impact

• It takes up to 10 weeks for both low and high DA links to show their first major jump.

While it may take up to 10 weeks for you to see any meaningful results of your backlink building endeavors, you also need to factor the time and effort it takes to do the link building activity. Unless you’re looking for cheap, automated, no value and blackhat links, you must spend adequate time and effort to plan and execute the link building campaign.

As a thumb rule, always prefer quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. Forge relationships with other genuine Internet property holders and look for ways that you can add real value to their website.

Guest posting is one of the key ways that you can add real value to the audience of a website. Website owners are always looking for fresh and original content that is geared towards their audience. These natural links not only offer the much-needed link juice to your website but also drive high volume traffic to your website, far outshining other low quality link-building endeavors.

What If I am Unable to Execute Link Building on my Own?

Then that’s where I come in. With more than 8 years of professional copywriting experience, I can help you build genuine links through intuitive and captivating guest posts, insightful Quora answers, persuasive podcasts, videos and slideshows, original PDF doclets and a plethora of other top quality link building practices recognized by leading experts, like Neil Patel and Matthew Woodward as the digital marketing industry’s global best practices.


I am Rizwan Qadir, an internet marketing professional with more than 8 years of copywriting and digital marketing experience. I specialize in providing high value, high quality backlinks to your website that are guaranteed to send targeted traffic to your website and boost your search engine rankings. To understand more about my top-rated link building philosophy or to discuss your specific website ranking needs, please get in touch with me at: https://www.fiverr.com/rizwanq149