Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
-
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites.
However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links.
Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
-
That's quite a tough question to answer as it depends on a huge variety of factors.
Some of the new websites sit on aged domains and are more powerful than brand new domains subsequently they rank quicker.
Some of the new websites are blogs and are updated with fresh content rather than static 'brochure' websites (which struggle to rank for anything).
-
Thanks, actually I think I misphrased the question. I don't mean the process of Google having it in the index, I was meaning how long it is taking for it to start to rank for long-tail keywords.
What has your experience been with this?
-
From our experience, indexation is actually occurring more quickly!
What method are you using to tell Google you have a new site?
Our web design partners will tweet out a new site when it goes live. I think the latest test it only took about 15 minutes for it to appear in Google's index! The authority of the Twitter account is medium (3-4 tweets/day, 500 followers).
We will always submit a Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
My Site name changed. Why does sometimes new name, sometimes old name show in Google.
My website name has changed in the title, but only shows up sometimes in the SERPs. What can I do to ensure the new name is the name that always shows up? It's been a month since the change and we have submitted a new sitemap. Here's one example: http://www.building.govt.nz/blc-building-act. In Google (for New Zealand building code) it shows up as Building Act - Department of Building and Housing. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielleNZ0 -
Google Signal for Site Speed: PageSpeed ranking, Time To First Byte, or something else?
We were having an internal discussion regarding what specific signal Google is looking for regarding Site Speed. My understanding was that Google primarily used Time To First Byte (TTFB) as its signal of Site Speed. My colleague argued that this is not part of Google's PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and therefore was unlikely to be the primary signal. Who is right? Is TTFB the primary signal or the score on PageSpeed Insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DesignHammer1 -
Google is squashing my rankings, insight please?
Last year with penguin, our rankings took a hit. We have worked hard, tirelessly, to recover. Last june we had no social media. We had an old website. We completely updated our website to responsive design, over 500k pages. We post daily fresh content, we expanded into social media. We now have 100k followers on Facebook. We are seeing thousands of Google + in the last few months, and not by hiring a single SEO consultant, and we use no ad-words or any paid advertising (except for adsense, limited on our site). We got thousands of Google +1's simply by sharing content in different circles and they liked us the old fashioned way. And yet our rankings have actually decreased. Just Saturday night, suddenly rankings that were on page 2 of Google dropped to page 5. Rankings on page 5 dropped to page 13, over night. Mind you, last year (prior to the penguin update), those page 2 and page 5 rankings were in the top 3 spots on page one. So its been quite a fall. We are doing something wrong, and I don't know what it is. The overnight rankings drop did not correspond with anything we did whatsoever. They just literally dropped abruptly. here is our site: (redacted for privacy, thanks for answering my question!) here is a sample of a fallen ranking. Friday, for example, we ranked on page one of google in this search:(redacted)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marshill
and now we are on page 3. I am open to ideas, suggestions. I want to raise our D/A and have worked hard over the last year to do so, but it doesn't seem to be working too well. Do i have bad inbound links? Is our site not a quality enough user experience? Outside advice is well received. Thank you to anyone who can lend their insight. 🙂0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Google is not Indicating any Links to my site
We built a new store on another ccTLD and linked to it from some of our other domains in a few locations. I am noticing that with the Google operator command "links:" we are seeing nothing linking to our site anywhere. Some things to clarify: These are not no-follow links These pages linking to our new domain are indexed The pages being linked to on our new domain are indexed This is not a flash site or heavy in JavaScript The links existed the day the site was launched so when the new pages were crawled they existed. "Site:" command in Google shows me that my new site is indexed. What could potentially be causing this? I am trying to get these newer ccTLD's to begin ranking and I understand that I need to get links going to these pages since they are fairly new (2.5 months) so I can outrank the .com in the SE's in those locales. (Like Google.co.uk)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
How can someone not call B.S. on this site ranking 4th.
We manage a lot of sites that are around pharmaceuticals and lawsuits. I was checking a couple of the sites around the keyword: Actos Lawsuit using the keyword difficulty with serp analysis. Our sites have done very little Adwords except for first month about a year ago and we have always ranked well and the client is very happy with the results. Tonight I notice a site that is http://wikilawsuit.org/drug-recalls/actos-side-effects-bladder-cancer-actos-lawsuit/ They are ranked fourth on Google. Our url which is http://actos-lawsuit.org/ is ranked 9th?? Frankly there are several sites ranked ahead and when you look at the parameters all the way across some we are killing. But Wiki, everyone is killing and it is still fourth. I ran it in OSE and the metrics came back better, but there is at best 3 to 4 real links out of 30 domains. This is a commercial site with a contact form in right sidebar and my guess is they are selling leads to lawyers. So they are about as Wiki as Hooters. That said, we see all the talk about quality links and I am seeing a lot of sites with few quality links and lots of junk links. Should we still believe it matters? Or, is it that it matters when the sites are huge (JC Penny), etc. but not if the site is under some critical number of poor links? Looking forward to a moz Fest on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0