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Less than 4 days ago I created the first few links to a new website. This website had at that time been online for a couple of weeks with about 10 pages. The incoming links are completely relevant and the most important word in the anchor text is a word for which the linking website has been performing well for several years.
Before linking the new website had been visited several times by Mediapartners-Google, most likely because I use Opera very much during development of a website. Googlebot had been there once or twice, perhaps because of the Google Toolbar.
Those links were created on the 19th. The website is in Google's index now and has fresh tags from the 21st and 22nd.
I don't know if new websites indeed do have a handicap these days. I have done nothing special to overcome such a handicap.
(I don't know if it might make a difference that I have owned the domain for a couple of years but for banal reasons not used it.)
More detail here: New Sites Sandboxed in Google [webmasterworld.com]
I suppose a bit of subjectivity as to what is 'competitive'
John, very good point. Met a guy some days ago who told me: "I'm very good in search engines, I'm number 1 for mycompanybrand. It took me just 500 EUR, and you want to charge that on a **** basis?"
The problem is, I've looked up quite a few terms and the rankings are dismal (lost somewhere outside the first 100 for all but one very specific term I've tried so far).
No one is having any issues getting indexed. That happens almost instantly and it is as easy as, if not easier than ever. It's the fact that new sites (February on) don't rank or get any traffic form G at all that is the phenomena.
in google is very easy it only takes 2 weeks
No, about a day.
in about 1 more week 2nd level pages will get spidered
No, about 48 hours.
it just takes time for new sites to start getting decent
Never seen it take this long.
1) New root page spidered same day as found on existing PR5 page. (A few hours after being found.)
2) New root page showing up in Google 2-3 days after first being spidered.
3) Interior pages spidered around three weeks after root page first spidered.
Timing probably depends on exactly how strong the PR5 page is, i.e. how close to a PR4 or a PR6.
I get crawled everyday and have a PR4 but don't rank well in anything except for company name.
Definately very odd.
this is not how web sites develop in an organic fashion
Wrong.
Charity that started about 6 months ago launched website at the end of January. Was linked to from dmoz/google directory and most other directories that allow non-profits. Also generated around 50 unsolicited links - some from PR7-8 pages. Doesn't show up for even the most obscure terms while the pages that link to it (older) do. This is how the web works. It is 100% organic. Every SE other than Google lists them on their appropriate terms as it is not a common cause for charity.
depending on the industry sector you are competing in Google is simply dialing back
Nope. We track 500 keywords/phrases in dozens of different areas and have not found a SINGLE case of a page from a site entering the top 10 if they were not allready in the top 100 in the past 7 weeks or so. In other words, no new sites have ranked in two months across 500 phrases.
I am sure there are exceptions, but unless you are studying a largish set of data, it's not really that interesting for this discussion - ya know the "MY site is ranking great and was put online yesterday because I am an expert seo" type posts :)
Anyone else having this much trouble?
For example, a new site went up at the end of January, well optimised, now PR5 (good enough for the top 10). Still no decent ranking for competitive phrases.
Site launched February - all(most) pages indexed, few referrals from G.
I get more visitors from Ask Jeeves for this site than Google.
Sure they have....I have several and some only 2 weeks old.
I don't know where this "new sites are being penalized by Google" thingy came from, but I simply don't see it. It is business as usual for me.
I look at 47 keyphrases combined with a tad under 78,000 US geographic locations. I don't see a problem, Google is indexing as per normal for the last 12 months.
The algo Google uses I question, but its ability to index and rank new sites I don't.
I might add that at the same time two other domains went live. Though these two domains are new the websites on them are not. One domain is nowhere to be seen in the SERPs while the other one performed perfectly right from the start. I have a strong feeling that the difference is a matter of links and perhaps age.
The badly performing domain has very few incoming links and there are still some to its old address. And its a fairly new website. It went live in December on a subdomain.
The website on the well performing domain also migrated from a subdomain, but almost all the incoming links (about 1000) were changed to the new address within minutes of the website being moved. This website is a couple of years old.
I don't know if these experiences have any relevance to the discussion about new websites or if this is quite a different story.
I launched a site in a very competitive area early january. Since then I received amazing backlinks from authority sites because they also believe it is a very useful resource. The site has a PR6 now but almost no traffic from google. In fact I get about 10 times more traffic from teoma/ask jeeves.
Sofar google spidered and indexed about 4% of all pages and the spider is still very slow. While all static pages are generated from a database, it is not spam but it could be easily mistaken for that if looking at it from a spiders perspective.
It is a huge site though and I believe that might be the problem. Google thinks it is unnatural to launch a very big site from the start.
But I still believe in the longtime success. If more and more authority sites link to my site, google just has to recognize this eventually and rank my pages accordingly.
On average they generate about 1,000 Google referrals per day. "how competitive" is relative, 1,000 isn't a champion, but for a new site it is acceptable in my book.
Building traffic takes time, Google has indexed and ranked these sites as well as I expected. 2 Years ago I might have seen triple this traffic for a new site, but that is the current Google Algo at play, not the age of the sites.
Sure they have....I have several and some only 2 weeks old.
No. Guess you weren't in that set of 500 terms. Unless you snuck into our office, not sure how you can say this. :)
I don't know where this "new sites are being penalized by Google" thingy came from, but I simply don't see it.
Not sure about the word "penalized" but the findings came from actual research by many who follow thousands of domains and terms other than their "own", not one guy saying his couple of sites rank well. Doubt there would be a 200 post thread in supporters if "business was as usual".
Some of the folks here are my competitors.....if they want to hang up their boots for a while I couldn't be happier ;)
I remember seeing a 800+ post thread here on how Google was penalizing certain "money" keyphrases back in November '03......anyone still believe that today?
Volume of posts doesn't correlate to fact. It is like saying the USA is a democracy.....sorry, it isn't....it is a Republic :)
No one is having any issues getting indexed. That happens almost instantly and it is as easy as, if not easier than ever. It's the fact that new sites (February on) don't rank or get any traffic form G at all that is the phenomena.
I have been monitoring this thread since it started and noticed the same thing with a new site that I launched around 20 days back. It's got around 20% of its pages crawled by Google, but absolutely no traffic at all from Google. To check, I even tried using long combination of keywords which should show up pages from my site, but to no avail.
However, just a few minutes back I checked my live stats which showed me some hits from google and I entered those same keywords which earlier didn't show up my site in the Serps, and to my surprise my site showed up in the top listings just now.
Just a heads up to those observing the same phenomena. Check out the Serps again and verify whether you also see the change or not!
Volume of posts doesn't correlate to fact.
No it doesn't. However, a large sample of actual research provides a heck of a lot more insight then someone a couple people saying that all is fine for their sites. The fact that many, many people are noticing this along with the fact that a few actually TRACK keywords, not just a handful of sites and have observed the same thing means a lot to some folks here. If it doesn't affect you that's cool. It also doesn't mean much to the webmasters that are experiencing the "quarantine".
Also, I doubt many aren't publishing sites due to this :)
