Does Domain Age affect SERPs performance?
This question gets asked a lot on webmaster forums. Usually people want to know whether their new domains are in something called the Google Sandbox. Google is reputed to deliberately make new domains do poorly in SERPs. The length of time that a new domain spends in the sandbox is usually thought to be about 5 or 6 months. The advice given when trying to make a new website rank well for a set of keywords is:-
- Keep adding good, keyword-rich textual content.
- Keep adding backlinks with good anchor text.
- Wait!
People also ask if there’s a secret to escaping from the sandbox. The advice here is to get high PR links, i.e. links Google trusts. This is meant to help a new domain escape from the sandbox and begin ranking well in a shorter period. Of course, no-one outside Google really knows if the sandbox exists for new domains but my experience is that there is very probably some age-related factor affecting the performance of domains.
The very first website I tried to optimise struggled for the first few months it went live, moving from page 9 or 10 of the results to about page 4 or 5 after 5 months or so. A strange thing began to happen around month 6 though. At certain times of the day, my website would appear in the top 4 results for a pretty good keyword. It would then drop back for the rest of the day. This continued for about a month until eventually I hit the jackpot and stabilised in the #4 spot. I then hovered around this position - say between #4 and #5 until the site was approximately one year old when it stabilised at #2. Ever since the site has rotated between #1 and #2.
Here’s the Google analytics for the site over the first year and a bit after the site went live. Organic traffic only started to really increase after the first 6 months even though I’d done a ton of link-building from the second week. The traffic in the first 6 months is also inflated in the graph below since about 50 to 75% came from Google Adwords
Of course, this graph doesn’t prove anything about how domain age affects performance in SERPs but I’ve since repeated the experience with other websites - for the first few months of the website’s life, SERPs performance and traffic can be hard to come by.
This is interesting. I have a site, the one that my name here links to, that for the first six months of its life just kept growing in traffic. At the end of the first six months, it had reached PR 4, and google had even just given me site links when everything crashed!!
Since then, traffic has been minimal, and there has been no change in PR since then.
Hi Dave,
The reasons why traffic arrives at a site can vary wildly from one website to another. In the case of the site I was writing about, the theme is business related and in now way the sort of the site people would visit unless they were specifically looking for the type of product on offer. It isn’t a blog that could attract a horde of followers. People who visit are unlikely to visit again - they either buy the product or decide it’s not of interest.
The blog in your link is a really nice blog and covers a topic a lot of people would be interested in. I notice it’s now PR”. Keep working on the SEO and visitors may start arriving in greater numbers again.
Mike
This is a great visual. I have heard that Google and Yahoo give all new sites a very temporary boost for the first few weeks and then the ranking falls dramatically until at least the six month mark.
I don’t know why search engines penalize new sites, just because a site is new doesn’t mean it is poor.
I guess as with everything else we just have to be patient.
Awesome article and one of the best I’ve seen on this topic. I’ve experienced almost an identical situation as you have described. Onb mt SERP’s I lingered on pages 10+ for the first 3-4 months, then on about month 5 I was the 2nd listing on page 2. I’m about 6 months into this ordeal and waiting for the explosion once I get out of the “sandbox”. Anytime I run seomoz, alexa stats, websitegrader, or anything that generates a “rating” always ranks me mucccchhhhh higher then even the websites that are 1-10 for my SERP. The only thing they literally have is higher PR and an older domain (some are 10+ years old!). So.. I’ll be back in a few months to update this post