How long does it typically take to see a boost in traffic after a strong increase in links?

[SparkplugDigital]

Suppose you have had a great month of linkbuilding and significantly increased the number of linking domains (say by about 10%).

How long does it typically take to see a noticeable uptick in traffic based on your experience?

[RyanKent]

Simply speaking, as soon as Google crawls a web page with a link to your site then you can immediately receive the benefits of that link. A few examples:

• you receive a link to your site from a popular story on the New York Times. That article will likely be indexed within 1 hour of it being published. You can then immediately begin seeing increased traffic.

• you receive a link from a "regular" site on an article which is mentioned on the site's home page "Recent Articles" block. Depending on the site's DA, the page will likely be indexed within a couple days and you will begin receiving the benefits after it is indexed.

• you receive a link from a regular site which is not promoted on their home page but instead is buried in the site. The site structure might be mysite.com/en/blog/articles/cars/2012/ford/sports-cars/mustangs/2012-mustang-gt. Well, that article may never be crawled and indexed in which case you would receive no benefit from the link.

• your link might be on a page which is noindexed or blocked by robots.txt which would not be seen

Also keep in mind a link to your site offers two benefits: direct traffic from the linking site and any benefit to improving the ranking of your search results which Google offers to you based on that link. You can receive a direct traffic boost instantly. You may or may not ever receive a boost from Google based on the link. If the link is nofollowed then Google wont offer you any benefit. Many sites are penalized from Google by having their links devalued for various reasons. If you receive a link from such a site, there is no ranking benefit.

The last point, Google will examine your site when determining a boost from the links. Are the sites linking in independent? If the sites have similar IPs, similar backlinks, same owners, use the same anchor text, etc. then Google will likely devalue those links.