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I launched a site 4 weeks ago, submitted to as many SEs as possible without paying that Ouverture scheme. Also submitted to dmoz.org and other directories.
Google picked it up after a couple of weeks, and the other engines have other sites that links to this one. AV has 12, Yahoo has 16, etc. But still, they don't list the site itself.
Before, this have never been a problem: If I launched a site that they had other, indexed sites that pointed to the new one, the latter (the new site) was indexed within a few weeks, too.
Are they (MSN, AV, etc) really pushing this Ouverure thing? Am I (or rather: the client) forced to fork out money to get listed?
TIA
Dan
There's been a lot of discussion on the board, though, that after Google finds and indexes you, they're taking a while before actually crediting those inbound links, so new sites are not ranking well. This has been variously called "sandboxing" (not strictly an accurate term, but it's caught on), or "time lag" (more descriptive, but it was late to the party and hasn't become popular).
To find more info, try this search in Google:
site:webmasterworld.com google sandboxing new sites
My feeling is that the time lag is a way for Google to check out and combat spam on throw-away domains on artificial link networks. The lag happens also to make Adwords more necessary if you're in a hurry.
As for Yahoo/Overture, I'd stay away from Site Match. It's PPC as well as PFI. It's not guaranteeing position... it's only guaranteeing indexing.
The argument one could make for PFI, which is actually paying for freshness, is that if you were in a fast changing retail market and needed catalogue pages included quickly, this might be either cheaper than Overture, or a good supplement to it.
A million thanks for very useful info. I'm running a business where web design accounts for about 50% and SEO on new sites used to be pretty frequent (and I was not too bad doing it - if I may boast a bit). But the past 8-9 months, I've been out of the SEO loop due lack of such assignments, and this was new to me.
However, Google and Yahoo are of course important. But the site's target group are using AV and MSN quite a lot (I have referral stats from an identical site), so I'm concerned about them, too.
I suppose I have to accept the sandbox game by Google, and we actually launched the site 2-3 months prematurely in order to have a "stabilized" rank when the actual business goes public. So I'm not too worried about that (yet).
But, as I wrote, what worries me is that AV, Alltheweb, Yahoo, Lycos and a few more have the inbound links listed, but not the site itself. Since your (excellent) reply mainly covered Google, perhaps you have some theory about these SEs "indifference"?
Oh, I don't want to come across as a Cheap Charlie (even if I am one :-) ), but I'm rnot too happy about paying for inclusions. The site has already passed the offer I gave the client due his changes, etc, and telling him he'll have to fork out even more might make our business relation somewhat infected.
Any thoughts you might have are welcome. I'll now go through the forum for relevant threads. I need to brush up my knowledge, that's for sure.
TIA
Dan
What's notable is that the site has only been crawled by Google, Alexa and Jeeves.
