In the latest episode of Google SEO Office Hours, they asked John Mueller about this issue, and he replied,
“It’s more along the line; I’d say a week, 1 and 1/2 weeks to allow the tool to display the latest link. It’s not a matter of months and not a matter of hours like with the performance report.”
John explained that most reports from GSC include “recalculated every three to four days,” and then there is the possibility of Google discovered the external links for new sites in its crawling. John estimated about one week or more.
Here’s what he stated:
“I’d have to inquire with the team. I have heard that many reports on Search Console are recalculated every three or four days. In terms of an entire week, you’ll likely get some data. When I think of the links report, it is that we display an example of websites we have linked to.
That doesn’t mean we’ll immediately add the link we have found with your site. That’s something I’m not certain about. I’m curious to know the time required to have that picked up.
But it’s not an issue of months. It’s also not an issue of hours with a performance report, and it’s more along the line. I’d suggest one week, one and a half weeks or something similar to that is an acceptable amount of period time.
What are external links?
External links to your website are the links that reside on your web pages and do not belong to your domain. Let’s understand this with an example. If you are viewing links for https://www.google.com/, all the links that do not originate from webpages on any subdomain of google.com would appear as external links to your website.
Why Are Links Important?
The more high-quality backlinks a webpage has, the higher it will rank. Any web pages that it links to will also rank higher. Knowing how search engines work makes it easier to understand the importance of links.
These links also are essential for passing on context hints to Google. They can help Googlebot comprehend the content and relevancy of webpages. Google’s indexing bot will travel the web using href attributes (aka links) to locate and index more pages on a website or other sites. The content of link source pages and the anchor text in links can help associate your webpages with specific keywords and enhance rankings.
