Indexing plan for a brand-new domain: the first 90 days
Index your own pages before you index anything pointing at them. A new domain with forty indexed backlinks and six indexed pages is a stranger recommendation with nothing behind it.
The classic failure on a new domain is sequencing, not volume. Links get bought in week one because that is the exciting part, and the site itself is still eleven half-finished pages Google has never fetched.
Weeks 1–2: make the site fetchable
- Verify the property in Search Console and submit a sitemap. Google's sitemap guidance is the baseline here, and honest
lastmodvalues matter more than most people think — a sitemap where every URL claims to have changed today teaches Google to ignore the field. - Publish the pages that define the site: homepage, the two or three commercial pages, an about page with real contact details.
- Check every one of them with URL Inspection. Not the sitemap count — the individual pages.
Do not buy links in this window. There is nothing for them to point at yet.
Weeks 3–6: get your own pages indexed first
Add content on a real schedule and submit each new page as it goes live. This is the period where you establish the crawl baseline that everything later is measured against. Watch the Crawl Stats report — average daily crawl requests should be climbing, not flat.
If pages sit in discovered – currently not indexed through this whole window, stop and fix that before spending a cent on links. A domain Google will not crawl is not going to reward you for pointing more URLs at it.
Weeks 7–10: first links, on a drip
- Start with links that would exist anyway: business directories in your actual country, industry associations, a profile on the two or three platforms your customers use.
- Submit them at 20–50 a day, not in a batch. At this age the domain has no crawl history to absorb a spike.
- Track the indexation rate per source. Directories that index at 20% are telling you something about the directory, and you should stop buying from it.
Weeks 11–13: read the data, then scale
By now you have three numbers worth having: your average daily crawl requests, your page indexation rate, and your link indexation rate by source. Scale volume only where the third number is healthy. Scaling a source that indexes at 25% just buys more URLs that will not count.
The four mistakes that make this go wrong
- Links before pages. Covered above; it is the most common one by a wide margin.
- Treating the domain age as irrelevant. The same 500-link package behaves completely differently on a domain with two years of crawl history.
- Chasing the Indexing API. It officially covers job postings and livestream pages only — see Indexing API limits before you spend a week on a service account.
- Never re-checking. Links indexed in week eight are not necessarily indexed in week twenty. See link decay.
Questions
How soon after registering a domain can I start building links?
The useful trigger is not elapsed time but state: your own key pages should be crawled and indexed, and Crawl Stats should show a rising baseline. On most new sites that lands somewhere in weeks four to six.
Should a new domain use drip-feed for its own pages too?
Usually not. Your own pages are typically few enough that ordinary sitemap submission plus internal linking is sufficient. Drip-feed earns its place once list size outgrows your crawl baseline.
The link stage, handled on a schedule
When your own pages are indexed and you are ready for links, a paced task keeps the daily volume where you set it.
Plan a paced campaign