How long for new domain to rank? Has it changed?

Is less than 1 year old crawled-domain penalty still on?

[liborson]

Hello,
while we have reached top 5-10 position after extensive link building within 8 months after registering the domain (appx. 6 months crawled by Googlebots), currently Pagerank 6, we still can not make it to the top. Yes, we are on high competitive market.

We have a list of strong back-links, mostly one way, from directories to themed blogs, naturally gained as well. Most of our keyword competitors have less (sometimes even 3x) links when using the link:domain.com operator but rate top 1-3. The only difference I can see is they are a, listed in DMOZ plus b, have an 3+ year old domain age.

Now my question is - does DMOZ link still matter that much? In my view, after all, it is only 1 link (maybe worth 10 average).

And most important, do you see any real evidence that the domain must be crawled at least certain /e.g. most commonly mentioned 12 moths, 1 year/ time to lift some untrust penalty from Google? In this specific case, 1 year crawling is not equal to the age of domain (which has been registered couple of months earlier than submitting to GWC/Sitemaps).

Have you anyone experienced that after passing 365 crawling days period of time, having a strong backlinks, suddenly made a jump up to the top? If so, when and how quickly?

[Robert Charlton]

liborson - I think you're talking about a combination of age-related ranking factors in Google, often referred to as the "sandbox." These include not only the length of time the domain and its content is crawled, but also the age of your inbound links.

It's helpful to think of these factors collectively as the length of time it takes your domain, and the inbound links to your domain, to establish "trust." There is no hard-and-fast rule about the length of time this takes, and it can be query specific.

I've seen new sites that get a lot of buzz (and a lot of "trusted" inbound links), rise up to the top on extremely competitive phrases very quickly.

You can lose trust as well as gain it, and some of Google's linking factors have an apparently very sharp cutoff, so a drop in ranking, or a failure to achieve ranking, is often incorrectly considered a "penalty." It may simply be that you just don't have the combination of relevance and PageRank and TrustRank and whatever it takes to achieve competitive rankings on a given phrase.

All that said, for a great many new domains it generally used to take a period of, say, eight months to a year or more for inbound links to kick in and pages to perform well on competitive terms.

I don't know whether this general time range has shortened. It's an interesting question. Any answer you get is going to be clouded by individual factors, though, so I thought I'd attempt this overview.

[liborson]

Dear Robert,
thank you for your reply, I really appreciate it as my English is not a native language, you got my message right. However, it seems to be still a bit too general in the means that you also mention some bit extreme situations, e.g. "hype" websites that get linked by old authority web dinosaurs :). By reading many of similar posts in this forum, I do not believe we are under "sandbox" effects for newbie websites, otherwise we would not be ranking top 5-10 SERPs on very competitive (commercial) terms, getting PR6 on our homepage + some deep pages etc. However I do understand and believe that aging inbound links, crawled domain and other age related factors are part of the game. What other indisputable to algo factors would SE have then, right? I have not noticed much anyone around saying that, but I am sure that AdWords best sellers are the guide for Google to find the real competitive terms and tighten up the organical SERPs rules for searches containing that Adwords bestseller.

However, I would like to hear real testimonies for real websites, that after passing (8-9-10-11-12-13-?X-Y? months from the first googlebot crawl - if this is the correct metric) the website gains its trustworthy thumbs up at Googleplex and gets equal chances in SERPS as its competitors (lets say 3+ years old). As I said before, we are beating all top 1-3 players by the amount/structure of inbound links, most of the time its quality as well.

Also, did anyone notices any prolonging of the aging factors limitations in the means of comparing e.g. 2 y.o. website vs. 6+ y.o. website in the favor of the older one as well?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:54 am (utc) on Aug. 27, 2007]