New site indexed, but no ranking at all

[thinkoutofthebox]

I launched a site about two weeks ago, submitted an XML sitemap at the same day. Site was indexed very soon. On the 5th day after launching, the site starts to receive some traffic and the rankings are pretty good, then three days later, my site seems lost all the rankings, I can't find my site with all the possible keywords, except using the exact URL as keyword and the site: operator.

The number of indexed pages keep increasing everyday, Googlebot also comes to my site every day, but just no ranking. I have added 4 links from my other sites (non-penalized) during the past two weeks, one of the links is from a PR7 well-ranked site.

Is this signal means that my new site has been penalized or I just need to give it more time?

Thank you!

[tedster]

You need more time - no penalty. Early on after a site is indexed, Google often gives it some good rankings to sort of test the waters. But it's very rare for a new site to keep those rankings unless it really catches fire." I've been calling those early days the "honeymoon period."

As backlinks grow for your site, you should see some rankings and traffic improvement.

[thinkoutofthebox]

Thank you for your answer tedster, but if it's the honeymoon effect, when the honeymoon ends, I think the ranking should drop instead of completely gone, isn't it? I checked the SERP from first page to last page, my site has completely disappeared. Now, my site can only be found when doing an exact URL search or a site: operator search. That's why I'm worrying about being penalized.

[tedster]

Have you violated any of Google's guidelines? If not, and if you have few or no inbound links, then it's too early to be concerned.

[Donna]

Over optimization , crap backlinks , honemoon period ended prematurely, linking from your own network with the intent of gaining ranks with targeted anchor spam , hard to beat competition, dupe content, thin content , affiliate + g-ads on the same page of a new site , incidental noindex meta or robot tags , domain redirects ..... bla bla bla . Give more info !

[Donna]

Still i can understand what do you expect from 2 weeks old site, might be just a simple dance. On a side note Tedster , did you notice the backlinks update in WMT finally ?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have a 4 month old site with several hundred useful how-to articles and several hundred natural backlinks which receives zero traffic from Google. I also have a 6 year old site that seemingly has a traffic cap of 4000 visitors per day because when that number is reached the traffic suddenly stops for the day, sometimes as early as 6 pm.

The above illustrates that there are indeed ceilings in place where certain criteria need to be met before you will receive any additional traffic from Google. Go figure, they aren't telling us what those criteria might be. The world is denied a mighty good resource as a result in favor of *cough* ehow *cough*.

More backlinks from better (and relevant) websites is still an important factor in raising your traffic limits, imo. Unfortunately for me some of the websites Google covets highly in my niche will only sell me a backlink, they won't ever link on merit and since I won't pay my ceiling is pretty solid.

[netmeg]

Yea I launched a couple of sites over Memorial Day that got some good long tail traffic right away, but they're only just now starting to pop into the top 3 for the primary focus keywords, with traffic rising accordingly. Things need time to percolate; Google and your users need time to figure out your value.

[Robert Charlton]

My emphasis added...

I have added 4 links from my other sites (non-penalized) during the past two weeks...

Apart from the relative newness of your site... I'm guessing from your own description that your backlinks might not yet be all that they should be. You may be looking at isolated, mechanical check points, but not looking at the bigger picture.

Eg, are the majority of your backlinks freely given, from independent, high quality, relevant sites? Google values naturally occurring backlinks from sources outside your own network... from sources you don't control.

You will need to generate traffic to your site so your backlinks come from people who have looked at the site and like what they see. "Buzz" about your site, online or offline, is going to be necessary to bring visitors in.

...submitted an XML sitemap at the same day.

This makes it sound like it's a large site. How large? If you launched the site all at once, how unique is your content? And how good is the content? While sitemaps may help Google crawl your site more efficiently, they don't help with your rankings. It's the quality of your content that helps sustain traffic and generate inbound linking.

These are all questions you need to consider. It's likely that there are going to be weak points, and those are the areas that are going to require work.

[ascensions]

Give it about a year... that seems to be about the time needed for most sites unless you hit upon something special.