Link age and search rankings

New websites often struggle to reach top rankings in the search engines until they've been established for quite some time. There are a couple reasons why this happens. For one, it takes a while for the search engines to visit your site and index its pages. Second, it may take a while for the search engines to discover the links to your site (which greatly affect rankings).

But webmasters have suspected something else is going on. Indexing can happen very quickly, and links on influential sites are found very quickly as well. Even if this is the case, new sites still struggle to show up for a couple months. Why is that? Some have theorized that Google has a 'sandbox' where new sites are automatically penalized/quarantined for a set period. Others believe that Google (and Yahoo & MSN) only give full "ranking" value to links that have been established for some time. This makes sense, since it would negate the effects of spammers purchasing short term text links to get a ranking boost.


I don't think there is such a thing as a "sandbox", but I have seen a definite link aging effect. Let's take a look at the referrer metrics for a new site I've been managing. Some info about the site: created in July, fully indexed by the end of July, all links were created and discovered (confirmed by looking at google's cache) by the end of July as well. No new content was created after that month, and no new links were added (if anything some disappeared as they were part of a press release). The topic of the site is not seasonal, i.e. searches for the site's topic should be fairly steady throughout the year.



Here is the graph of traffic from Google. As you can see, there is a significant spike around December 1st, roughly 5 months after the site was created and links were established.


Here is the graph from Yahoo. You see a similar jump closer to January 1st. Notice the jump is not as pronounced (maybe link age is not weighted as heavily). The fact that the jump was later may indicate a longer aging period, or it may just reflect the fact that Yahoo is much slower at indexing sites and finding links.




Here is the graph from MSN. The jump is much sooner indicating either no link age penalty at all, or a very short one. This is consistent with my experience with other sites as well, any improvements in ranking show up in MSN first, then Google, then Yahoo.



To me, this is pretty conclusive evidence that all 3 (or at least 2) major search engines discount the value of links until they've existed for a while. What can we conclude from this? Have patience! Better search rankings and traffic don't happen overnight, don't be surprised if it takes months. Finally, if you are using sound SEO techniques, stick with it. Eventually it will pay dividends.


Tags: Links, Search Engines, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

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