Some forums have reported that new sites take longer to rank well in Google - despite relatively high Page Rank.

The trend seems to be this: when new sites are first uploaded they receive close Google attention and decent rankings for their keywords. After two to three weeks these new sites drop in the rankings and pages from these sites drop from the index as well.

The poster who first noticed this phenomenon tested his findings by placing pages from his new site into an older site. These new pages soon ranked well for their keywords on the older site. (Please read the post for full details, including other.)

Logan, a JimWorld moderator, said, "new sites seem to react different to changes (slower) than established sites when it comes to rankings - based on my experiences with new sites since florida/austin/brandy..."

It's curious that, as jimish reported in JimWorld, for his site, "Pagerank has been going up steadily, but what good is that if you don't show up in the results."

Logan also offered a potential explanation, "my guess is that there is an initial 'local rank' established based on the contents indexed from the site. But afterwards, there seems to be some delay with the role links play."

Excell, another forum moderator, reported that, "one good tip I picked up is to manage client expectations early & another, if you have domains sitting out there (maybe with holding pages waiting for a site to be built, like I do) get them moving a bit."

Excell also mentioned possibly allowing spiders into the site before its completion, perhaps getting the site over the Google drop phase (I saw no mention of how long this "phase" may last).

Read the full post at JimWorld.

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I have noticed the same thing. There is also a couple of long threads at WMW on it as well.

Google seems to be still picking them up OK, but they rank really poorly for a disproportinate amount of time (but several eg's have been given of quick rankings) - its almost as though tthat Google needs the time and several iterations of the algorithm to really work out what a site is about - calculating the theoretical LocalRank and/or Topis sensitive pR is one option. Google is much more sophisticated in teh way that it analyses link structures etc, so it maybe needs a couple of algo iterations to sort this out properly for site.

CBP

PageRank is almost irrelevant at Google now. Months ago I obscured my PageRank essay at Google Watch by disallowing indexing and putting it in an archived directory. It's simply no longer an important topic.

Recent interviews with two people who know a huge amount about search engine algorithms, suggest that PageRank was always more hype than anything else. It was mathematically elegant, but similar results could be achieved with much simpler techniques because the recursive nature of the calculations meant that tremendous CPU power was needed for a proper calculation. I am referring to an interview with Matt Wells, the person behind Gigablast, and another with Jon Glick, senior manager of search at Yahoo.

About 12 months ago, Google stopped their monthly crawl-compute-update cycle. This cycle was the backbone of a complete PageRank calculation. Why they did this is still a mystery. It could have been that they were running out of 4-byte docIDs, or they may have finally decided that the old PageRank calculation was too expensive. Even before this happened, Google was doing much more "fresh" crawling and indexing, which required that they make a guess of PageRank based on a site's directory structure and rank for its old top-level pages.

By now I don't see hardly any correlation between ranking and PageRank, and frequently the toolbar PageRank makes no sense at all. It only takes a few links from a PR 7 site, for example, and you already have a PR 6. Normally you would need several times the number of links to graduate one digit on the toolbar PageRank scale. This is clearly not the case anymore.

The sooner we all stop talking about PageRank, the less confused we will all be.

Just to jump in on this one, I am having the same trouble with a new site I have had up for less than two months. I finally managed a PR, on the index page only, but I am not showing at all in searches. I have optimized, there is good content, and the url is good. Hearing this makes me wonder if it's worth putting up new sites.

I have to domain names waiting for me to build sites. Am I going to be hurt when I get them up or is not longer worth it?

Scary stuff!

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Jan Carroll
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com
http://www.arclightgraphics.com

I don't think they will be hurt - its just taking a longer time for Google to work out there ranking (not just PR). It has been suggested that with all the more recent specualted modifcations to the ranking algorithm that it takes a while for Google to do the work up of a new site (eg a more indepth analysis of link structures etc)

CBP

Thanks cbp.

New websites that I have done for clients don't seem to be going through the same thing that my new one is. They are indexing quicker. I'll hang in and see.

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Jan Carroll
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com
http://www.arclightgraphics.com

It's not a matter of crawling or indexing, or even of pagerank. There seems to be a tie in on all new sites that is similar to the suppression seen since Nov with the notorious updates. No rank for what the site is about - only very obscure phrases. The site is there (right on target) on checking further by various means.

Whatever it is that is happening does not reflect well on Google's relevancy or freshness (IMO).

It is comforting to know, for web site owners/optimisers/marketers, that they are NOT the only ones and that they have done nothing wrong (well unless they have of course :)) For most quality content providers launching fresh sites there is a problem with google not you.

I have seen this happen to new sites as well. The pages get indexed, and then rank very good. Then after some time the ranks just dissapear.

The reason for this in my opinion is that when a new site is up, all that Google has to go on is the site it self. It determines the topic of the pages and will then rank the pages. Perhaps because it is a new site, it won't use PageRank in a positive or negative way.

But then Google finds some links,.. Links seem to be very important to determine topics. (backlinks but also outgoing links) and based on those links the page can be placed in a different topic which results in a complete drop in ranks for certain phrases.

Then while growing more and more backlinks, and doing it smart,. you will eventually get back in the top.

This is all based on the idea that some form of TSPR is in place at google.

Tip,.. Try some smart ways of linking out to get your site right on topic.

Regards,

Peter

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I'm seeing a similar problem with several sites that have been created in the last few months.

Many of them had their top-level page indexed by google in the first few weeks and seemed to be simply awaiting spidering of the entire site. Then, inexplicably the indexing seems to have been undone and there's been no further improvement.

They went from having their page-title and brief description for the index.htm in the SERPs to now having only the www.domainname.com show in the SERPs. No page-title, no description, nothing... just the domain name.

Meanwhile, the sites have already been indexed and are ranking top-ten in other engines such as Yahoo and MSN.

I've been trying to figure a cause for this and have even been looking into whether my host's virtual IP configuration might be responsible, since the only common denominator is that they all share the same host. But so far, no satisfactory explanation.

Any thoughts or similar experiences would be very welcomed.

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Jade Burnside, Ahead of the Web
What good is your web site if no one can find it?
SEO & Optimized Web Site Design

I seem to have no prob whatsover with google when it comes to my upcoming site http://reelinthefish.net but yahoo doesn't want to acknowledge its existence. Funny it shows every other website that mentions reelinthefish, but won't gimme results for plain old reelinthefish.net

I wonder what's the deal ?

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Hi all... First post in here so be easy on me. I'm not pretending to know a great deal about page rank etc but what i have noticed with the recent site is this; within google there are thousands of page ranks for the word Subaru Impreza.... However, type in Subaru Impreza.org and my site is found.... BUT this site does not appear on the first page, links of other well established sites come first...

If anbody wants to anylise my site and give us a few tips please feel free :-)

Other than that my newly created site does not want to appear in google :-(


Also, can a badly configured server contribute to a low page rank?

What is the url of your website?

Badly configured servers can make it difficult to get the site indexed by a search engine,. but when in the index it does not effect PR. PR is simply a calculation based on links. You can read some simple explanations here: PageRank Explained

Regards,

Peter

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I have found this too. I have experienced it as far back as 12 months ago when I first came back onto the scene of web site building and posting. Having been away for a while I didn't realise this was out of the norm!

I put it down to google doing the following processes (pure speculation!)

1. Initial index of site
2. Insert site into results with high listings with keywords, titels, etc
3. *this appears to last aprox 2 weeks (ish)
4. From click thrus from traffic, calculate using results and alog to persive real value of page and assign realistic pagerank to site.
5. relist site in results using real PR

This is of course pure speculation on my behalf but if you think about it logicaly it would mean that google would....
see if surfers click through a page and the time spent on the page (this would show up cloaked pages with script forwaording?!?!?) indicating if the page/site was of real worth in the real sence not just on what google can "see"

ah,. :) I found the url.

Some comments:

Move the style information to an external style sheet (.css file)
You´re not using any heading tags. Those should be used.
Most of your backlinks come from guestbooks and forums. They can bring in visitors, but they don't do much for pagerank.
More quality backlinks will definitely help you get your site indexed faster.

Regards,

Peter

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In believe Google takes its time ranking new sites for the following:

1)Spam - Google may be setting a probationary period for all new sites to see if they are going to be spammers or link up with blacklisted sites, ffa etc.

2)Shes getting so big that she must skim read the so called "prefix" to get a general idea for the first rank determining category. (I think of Google as the biggest librarian that is delivered a thousand books to index that she must first categorize.)

3)determination of the new site's relevance to the sites that it spidered in from.

Suggestions: If you have existing pr4+ websites, Park your future developed domains on the these sites. Submit and Link your parked domains where accepted then, break away about two months later. You will end up with a "PR4 out the door" for your new websites. Be sure to link your sites up with sites that are directly relevant to the text content that is in the same category as your own. I believe this builds more of a cluster of information shared by several sites which is what the new Google algorithms are aiming for.
Good Luck

Why is it that we cannot just build good quality web sites and just launch them? Why does google have a problem with that? If a web site builder (a content provider) has to go suss out what or what is not necessary for indexing in order to be found - there is a problem. Google should look to quality not games.

There's definately something afoot.

I have a client who's site went live over a year ago, probably around 16 months ago now. They had a good ranking in G. and came up across the partner sites too for a number of decent keywords.

Suddenly around a month ago a huge number of pages where dropped in one go across the G. network. Strange thing is soon after this happened their page rank went up a point.

The G. bot still crawls the site as regular as before. My first thought was that they had an incoming link from a dodgy site but checking this I could find nothing.

Further to this I put a couple of personal sites together back in February and got the first of them in G. with a Pr4 in the space of two weeks, the second one following a couple of weeks later.

These sites are getting heavy G. bot crawling, just checked one of them 635 visits since 1st April. So it's not limited to new sites.

Hopefully things will settle soon and the site will get relisted.

I own/manage 20+ sites and this is the only one that's suffered in this way. Knowing it's happening elsewhere at least tells me it's not totally down to the site.

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I thank you for your comments. it really is appreciated and i will do my best to contribute to these forums as much as possible.

Kind regards

Gareth

You are forgetting that Google still is faster than any other search engine. Many people get used to Google's ways and then complain when it doesn't go as fast as expected. But which other search engine is even close to Google's speed of indexing? Pretty much every other search engine has less pages of your website in its index than Google.

Just something to think of before you complain too much,. :)

Regards,

Peter

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There is no doubt the newer sites are getting indexed, but seem to be taking linger to actually get any sort of ranking than in the past.

Some thoughts:
1. New sites may now be run through some sort of additional filtering/ranking process that just needs a longer time to be finished eg latent semantic indexing - needs a lot of processing power (assuming G have implemented this)
2. This could be an intentional delay to avoid the quick ranking of so many affiliate/template/crap sites - pretty much every keyword(s) is well covered, what does it matter to Google is a few sites rank poorly for a few months? In the past it was easy for any old crappy site to get a top 10 for non or mildly competitive keywords.
3. Age of a site could be a factor in the ranking algorithm (see 2)
4. Why should new sites should rank well anyway????. - maybe Google needs time to carefully calculate things in realtionship to other sites (eg links structures, authority status etc)

CBP

__

I honestly believe it's a simple case of Google's way to keep a close eye out for upcoming web sites.

In the past it may of taken forever to have google come in and cache your web site. These days, I know that once my clients register their web sites and about 48 hours after I upload their sites, google is there taking a snap shot of their main page.

It's almost like GG is saying, we know what you're about even before you promote it. Let's just say for instance they catch 1000 sites out there that are about to promote spam tactics and emmediately red flag their site for future refference. Wouldn't that be great research information for the future? Sure it would.

On another note, yes I agree it stinks that new sites get fantastic ranking right away and then presto, you're gone. For me, this is nothing new. Every site i've ever built has gone through this.

Never mind page ranking anymore. Stick to what works in the real world. Find great business partnerships that best fit your business and come up with small, simple strategies to promote each others business!

I would recommend to every web designer out there, prepare your clients for this quick ranking drop. Don't promise the world and show them their quick results. Tell them that this kind of thing happens and that it's a matter of promoting their site on a weekly basis in order tell Google and other big search engines that their not going away!

Well these are my 2cents, what about you?

Best Regards,

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Smartads - President

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I have some questions to everybody that experienced this.

1) Did your site initially rank good, and then seemed to disappear?

2) When a rank did come back, was it like climbing slowly up, or all the sudden pop up somewhere in the top 50 or 100, or maybe even in much higher positions?

I believe it pretty much has to do with the Topical Sensitive PageRank that seems to be in place now. Backlinks and outgoing links are a huge factor in determining the topic of a page (it could fit into more than one topic).

In any way, if Google thinks the topic of your page is not the same as the topic of the search query, then your page is not even selected for ranking. This could be why sites seem to be popping up in the results or suddenly disappear.

Regards,

Peter

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Hi All

Each of my clients has hit googles front page for at least two of the three keyword groups I have them target.

They also will drop off the following month, and then pop back on the next and hang there a bit.

Google recently started giving more attention to directory listings (DMOZ) as well as product category results. I've seen a ton of yahoo, Amazon, bizrate, mysimon, and a few other portal type shopping sites.
Examples Below:

shopping.yahoo.com/b_electric-shavers-men-s_28664531

shopping.msn.com/category.aspx?catId=1564

bizrate.com/
buy/products__att256143--264848-,cat_id--90.html

Also if you look at the bottom line of the listing you'll start to see the URLs are including the exact page referenced by the keyword. See example below:

www.247highstreet.co.uk/listings/ health-beauty-grooming.htm

What this shows is that the 100 or so different measures of the google and other major search algorithms factor in quite a bit beside PR.

It also shows where you need to take clients to naming their pages correctly as opposed to something they like and can easily remember. As in the above two examples the following URL leads us to even further intrigue, Googles also tossing in results from around the world.

www.comparestoreprices.co.uk

Great spreading the competitive reach worldwide and you have to admire googles prowess in earning revenue around the world.
These guys may also have spent time at Wharton School. Perhaps in drag ??

I love to ramble, so I'll go a bit further.

Do you do keyword research??

My client min.com ranks # 4 on google for the search term "mens hair care" Now here’s the kicker the term is not grammatically correct. Yet Pulls in about 1000 searches a month.

They rank # 10 on google for the search term "men's hair care" Which pulls about 2000 searches a month.

Also if you do a google search for either term you will see most of the results returned are for shopping sites and not pure play retailers like my client.

Want to really be amazed? Visit the clients website. The index page has virtually no content yet ranks on many of the major search engine front pages.

Gotta love great SEO !!

As a side note I have only ever submitted my clients sites to google and the open directory project. They are always picked up by every major out there, and a great deal more of the minor players. (Work smarter not harder).

Also as a side note, both min.com and lightadelight.com had cloaks, redirects, and more, yet through timely intervention we were able to stay on the front pages, after some repair.

From where I sit there’s no magic pill for hitting the front page, page rank means little if your contents stale, content matters little if your sites not optimized for the customer, link backs matter little if you have good quality links out and good content, good design, navigation, and proper SEO.

There's no great mystery to it. Cut the hype, ditch the tricks and tactics, and just produce results.

Clint
www.sem-seo-pros.com
Watch as our site is built.

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Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimization Blog
"The only thing not possible, is whatever you tell yourself is impossible"....

Hi everyone. I'm new here. Problems with Google are what have brought me here.
Well, I feel a little better knowing others are experiencing the same difficulties with Google that I am.
My story is very similar to what I seen in this forum: a new site ranking very well about 2 months ago, and then it slowly fell off.
The site is coming up very well on Yahoo and other engines, number 1 for my target phrases.
The only problem is my client for this site loves Google. If they they don't see it on Google they don't think it's even on the Web. They were very happy to see the first page results 2 months ago, but now they keep asking me where it went. They act like I took it somewhere.
Google has a lot of guidelines they want us all to follow. It's very frustrating to be following all the rules and getting nowhere.

What is the URL?
There could be other reasons.

CBP

My personal opinion is that Google will soon introduce its LocalRank (aka after Yahoo's WebRank public release), emphasizing only on regional web pages. A good start might be to add your web site to DMOZ (10/10 PR). Then use good content (not common content, but innovative). We've had a new agricultural web site to be promoted and it did quite fine on Google, despite the fact that it was from Romania (aka the place where you will never see a higher-than-8 PageRank). You have the advantage of using American IP addresses; use them :)

__________________
Made in Europe.

The LocalRank that has been discussed in the context of the Google algorithm has nothing to do with locality or region. It is similar to PR and is based on "local" sites in the search results. It is not even close to Yahoo's WebRank which is based on traffic.

There is no advantage in having on American IP address.

CBP

I have always found that old sites even if just by someone who has posted a few pictures, rate higher in Google than new sites, and at times can be quite difficult to get past

I have seen this too, in a number of instances:

Here is my speculation:

Google is putting new domains "on probation". The ranking for the pages on new domains won't rank as well as they would if they were on an existing domain, all else equal. This speculation is based on the "normal" ranking of pages based on backlinks, anchor text, and page titles. Google may be doing this to combat fly-by-night spammers and other temporary sites, as suggested previously in this thread. While such a tactic may be successful in this goal, it also hurts new sites, including new Mom & Pop sites.

Here is my personal example. Of course, there could be other factors at play, but for what its worth:

-Site launched Feb. 22: http://mt-hacks.com, title of home page is "MT Hacks"

-Today, 2 months later, searching for 'mt hacks' (no quotes) shows the site at #87. You can examine the SERPs to make your own determination if this rankings is appropriate

-On the same search, also note that an entry on one of my weblogs - announcing the new site - ranks #9. This weblog entry is posted on an existing domain name. This is approximately the position I would expect for the home page of the new site, but instead the new site is 80 positions lower.

As I said, there could be other factors at play here, but it seems to me like the new site is ranking lower due to its young age.

My site torontoTALENT.com has been visited by google, and visible for about a week. Then dropped, and only the url was displayed.

I have no other site where I can transfer my site to so that I can get their pr, so is there anything else I can do...

I'm having a hard time finding sites that relate to my content.. Currently I'm my site contains everything that I am interested in, so I don't know who to link to, or who would want to link to me...

I have 0 pr..


I have worked with sites, but all have had 4 pr or more..

If anyone has any suggestions, or some site that I can read please post, it will be apreciated...

Stiki,

You could do much more than just exchanging links. An example is to write articles about subjects related to your website and submit them to sites like www.knowledge-finder.com. They allow you to have a signature with a link to your website.

These are great links as they come from very related pages.

Regards,

Peter

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In my experience there are a couple of factors at play. When a new site goes up, it seems Google ranks it based on internal links. After a few days, Google seems to want external link verification for the site. At that point, new sites usually have few if any external links. And even if they do have external links, Google may not have re-spidered those pages since the new site went up.

I'm curious, though, just how good a page rank you can have on a brand new site to start with as seems to have been alleged in the original post?

Bill

Greetings,

Reading these postings, one person had asked if anyone knew whether having several sites hosted on the same virtual server could have any detrimental effect on site rankings. A follow up had said that a poorly configured server would potentially hurt that site's SEO efforts. If this is true, how do we learn if this is an issue for specific sites?

I've launched several sites over the past year, dentist sites mainly, that all have dropped off completely over the last 2 months or so, after being consistently on the first page.

The site, www.burkedentist.com , I researched tareted keywords, created page titles, have several targeted backlinks to the site and got it listed on the DMOZ directory as well. The main keyphrase isn't very competitive, 'Burke VA dentist' but I'm getting 0 visibility so I'm wondering if the server issue could be a problem. 2 other sites that have completely dropped off as well, and that are on the same server, are www.drdancassidy.com and www.drmarygregory.com.

Thoughts are very much appreciated.

thx
rob

I'd also like to hear anyone's thoughts on the server configuration as a potential cause of this problem. Looking forward to some feedback on this.

__________________
Jade Burnside, Ahead of the Web
What good is your web site if no one can find it?
SEO & Optimized Web Site Design

Besides the same server, your sites have other things in common. They are not optimized at all.
(no meta description tag, titles don't target anything but the company/family name, copy is totally not optimized, no use of header tags, etc., etc.) Besides this.. I can't find any backlinks that can do your websites any good.

So don't worry about your server. You really need to do a lot of optimization and link building.

Regards,

Peter

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Just like to comment on "new domains being on probation" I personally dont think this is the case (But its close) What I have observed is that "new links" are what get placed on probation (In the sandbox) as it were. And so no ranking benefit for any competitive term can be acrued because the links dont get credit for 3-4 months down the road. This is slightly different then a domain's age in that it doesnt make sense to penalize a new site, it may have the greatest new content in the world! However it makes sense to legitimize new links as they may be purchased, spammed or many other reasons. Waiting a few months before counting them would make the PR purchasers die off and not allow spam domains to be Google bombed to the top.