A new domain: How much time does it take to get into the index – an analysis
I recently registered a new domain for my ham radio blogs webdirectory. The domain was never registered before and therefore is not “burned” or banned in any way. Lets see what happened with respect to search engines.
I registered the domain on Januar 19th. Content was already there so that linking could be started right away. For a start I linked my blog and my index page (PR3 and PR4). Additionally an external PR4 link plus some smaller external links were set.
What happened next: The first visitor about 5 hours after the link setup was the Mozilla Googlebot. It took the index-page and went away. The regular Googlebot showed up at around 0320z (which is 04:20 local time in Germany) and also took the start page. The next bot that came was Yahoo! Slurp taking the index-page at around 0920z on January 20th. msnbot was slowest but took the most pages: The bot showed up on January 21st 0919z.
Google had the domain roughly 24h after setup listed in the index. Still bad ranking (I suppose sandboxed) but indexed and “live”. MSN listed all indexed pages about 24 hours after crawling them. The same with Yahoo!.
What does this tell us? It is probably not very representative but if you put a few “good” links to a new domain it takes 24-48h until the domain is available in the index. Now we have to work on the ranking 
(e.g. more links.)
