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Do new sites get a chance at all?

altough everything seems to be fine (PR, SEO) it is not

         

Mito99

6:09 pm on Apr 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



hi,

I wonder if thereīs a certain period it takes for a site to get decent ranking positions. We have quite a couple of websites. Some of them are quite old now and very well established within the ranking positions. The PR there is 6++. But there are also sites that are not ranked well at all although the number of backlinks are ok, PR is also 6, SEO is made the same way as on all the established sites, they have lots of content which is updated several times a week and these sites are definitely not suffering any kind of punishment (at least thatīs what I think).
Some of the pages are optimised for niche keywords but still.... other sites with fewer PR, fewer backlinks, less content and not matching metas are still being prefered by google. So I can only imagine that there must be something I didnīt see yet. What is it?
With the older sites itīs a piece of cake to get new pages listed and well ranked in no time. But with newer sites (3-6 months old) itīs always the same: Google crawls the site, indexes all pages, gives it a PR of 5-6 and...end of story. Iīd appreciate any advice in this matter! Thanks :)

conroy

7:23 pm on Apr 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



same thing here... google is indexing pages, giving PR, but not giving SERPs for a while even with tons of links.

JudgeJeffries

7:43 pm on Apr 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've got exactly the same problem. 2 new clean sites, crawled and got good rankings for a week or two then nothing. These sites are totally unconnected, different owners, different hosts, different links, not croslinked, no serious optimisation, no stuffing etc etc yet they both disappeared from the serps on the same day. Visitors are 50% of what they were in those first few weeks.

conroy

7:55 pm on Apr 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



All I can say is it seems that time + links solves the problem. Especially relevant links.

BigDave

8:06 pm on Apr 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Of course time matters with brand new (less than 4 month) sites. It takes that long for things to get fully worked into the system.

But I really don't think that time is a specific piece of the ranking algo. Just give them a little time to get your site crawled and integrated, and to find all the links pointing to you, along with the anchor text, and get that worked in as well.

Lothar

1:37 am on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Google has been much slower in ranking sites that are new to a few months old. Heck, some sites can't even be found by name if it has a competitive keyword as part of the name.

It probably has something to do with the new algorithms that are in place since the Florida update occurred as their computers have to calculate more variables which would mean slower updates/rankings to new sites. Patience is the keyword here... New sites will rank but they just take more time than it used to.

rfgdxm1

1:52 am on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>New sites will rank but they just take more time than it used to.

It may also be an anti-spam measure. The delay gives Google more time to figure out if new sites are spam.

jpell

2:20 am on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Mito,
Some of the pages are optimised for niche keywords but still.... other sites with fewer PR, fewer backlinks, less content and not matching metas are still being prefered by google. So I can only imagine that there must be something I didnīt see yet. What is it?

Sometimes I think it is just dumb luck. I have a very diverse website. Think about.com That's me only with about 100 pages of content, but it is all related. I have one page in specific that ranks position 3 or 4 depending on the day sometimes, for a very competative term. This against entire huge websites about the term, not like me, with one page about the term and maybe 10 loosely related to it. I used the same formats for all of my other pages but didn't get the same results. (As an aside, I get very decent traffic, mostly from a few pages). Anyway, I started looking at the description G gives for a query result for very competative pages completely unrelated to mine, and compared it to my best traffic producing pages. Unbeknownst to me (dumb luck) and like me, those pages had returned a description in G that produced not only the main keywords relative to the page, but generally 2 synonyms ... and ... (the average Joe and the above average wouldn't see a correlation between the three). Back to LSI I guess. Take a look at your SERP results for your best pages and check the words in the description for the synonym of the keyword which brought up the result. You will draw your own conclusions I'm sure, but it is compelling.
JPell

newwebster

3:17 am on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"All I can say is it seems that time + links solves the problem. Especially relevant links."

I agree with this, make sure your links come from relevant content pages. It does not hurt to link out to relevant content either.

MikeBeverley

10:39 am on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It may also be an anti-spam measure. The delay gives Google more time to figure out if new sites are spam.

I agree, and I feel that this is quite an important part of the Google algorithm. I have one site that I've had since 2000 and it ranks highly for a very competitive keyphrase in the SEO field. This may not sound like hard work considering I've had four years to perfect it, but:

The main page does not mention my keywords at all.
Each individual page only mentions its particular keywords once in plain text (no headers, bold etc.)
There are only 6 pages to the site.
The site has a PR of 5.
There are only 5 inbound links and only two of these mention the main keyword.
The Dmoz listing does not have the keywords in it (poor Dmoz editing)

And like I say, it is No.5 for an SEO competitive keyphrase. The only thing it has over the rest is that my whois data shows me owning the domain since 2000.

mfishy

12:13 pm on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



New sites are getting indexed almost instantly but are taking far longer than before to score well - at least in semi-competetive to competetive spaces.

cabbie

3:30 pm on Apr 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I believe its the fact that you already have a site competing in the same niche and google have connected the two as being too much alike whether it be in linking patterns or content.
Google's way of fighting one person dominating serps.

Mito99

10:52 am on Apr 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the ideas guys! Somehow it all makes sense.

Midhurst

12:19 pm on Apr 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Mito,
I've read in another thread that new pages are given - or appear to be given - a higher provisional position in the serps than when they are finally PR'd.
I have a really peculiar example of this on one of my sites.
I added a free Guestbook three weeks ago.
Guess what?
The Guestbook ranks higher in the Serps by about 10-20 positions compared to my Index page with a PR of 4.
The Guestbook , with a PR of nought, has in its title my two keywords - nothing else. There are only two messages in the Guestbook and none contains either one of the keywords. There are no back links and no other content.
It's a real mystery why Google bothers to acknowledge the Guestbook atall, let alone give it a position of circa#15 in the Serps. Does anyone understand this one?

WebBender

4:32 pm on Apr 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Actually, I have very few links, but have a good number of SERP's from Google. They are deep in the index like page 4 or 6, but they are there. Site is just 1 month old.

Google's done pretty well in indexing pages and listing pages in targetted SERP's.

Google has 183 pages indexed. Yahoo just has my index page indexed. :)

WB