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New Websites And Google, Does This Sound Familiar?

Posted by Paul B | January 13, 2008 .

Ever since I wrote my post about having a launch pad to boost any new websites you create I’ve been running an experiment. All I’ve done is create a couple of totally new blogs but instead of going through my usual approach of giving them some serious link love from my more established websites I’ve left them on their own. It’s been quite interesting for me to see that each of them has performed almost identically in terms of the traffic that Google has sent them.

So you start a brand new website, one of the first things you want to do is let the search engines know about it. A sitemap is one of the best ways of doing this, so 5 minutes later I had a sitemap that I submitted to Google’s webmaster tools. 2 days later I check and I can see that some of my pages are now included in Google’s index, excellent. Now in the first week my website starts to rank, quite well actually and I’m starting to see nice amounts of organic Google traffic heading my way. It looks like all systems go.

Jump forward to 2 weeks later, all of a sudden my website is no longer ranking anywhere and the traffic has all but disappeared. Has my website been penalised for something? What’s going on?

What I Think Is Happening
I think that Google loves fresh content. However because it’s so new it knows that it will have a very bad linking profile (if any) and so it’s rank is based almost entirely on it being brand new content. As the days pass your fresh content goes from being new to aged and at this point Google starts paying attention to who and what is linking to it. Don’t have any/many quality related links and you slip all the way down the SERPs.

How Do You Stop It?
There are 2 approaches I’ve found that work. The first is just to pump out more fresh content, that way you always have something that is fresh in the eyes of the search engines. It also helps if you can link back to some of your older content with your newer content, remember that your internal linking structure is just as important as your external linking structure. The big problem I’ve found with this approach is that after many months with none of your pages getting good links from external sources then Google seems to flag your domain as being crap (This is just my experience). At that stage it doesn’t matter how much new content your write you’ll find it very hard to attract organic Google traffic.

The second approach requires a little more work. You’ve heard of link building, well this is where it matters. I’ve found that even by having 4-5 new links to your new content every week or so can help to maintain it’s position in the SERPs. To keep your content in it’s original position for a month or 2 is not that hard with just those few links, it’s much easier to put that little bit of work in early rather than have to try and boost your content later when it’s fell of the SERPs altogether.

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1 Comment so far
  1. SEO Optimization ITALY Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  January 14, 2008 4:51 am

    Hi Paul,
    This is an interesting argument and indeed it does make sense. I believe the second approach is way more appropriate (my opinion) it is always better to prevent instead of cure (in this case to maintain instead of build back).