We recently published a post here on the website that took a very quick look at some of the ranking factors that we know that Google uses to assess your website. One of those factors that we mentioned was the age of your website.
So why is the age of your website a ranking factor? Well, before I jump into that, I need to remind you of something else I said in that post.
We know that the age of your website is a ranking factor but we really don’t know how much importance Google places on that factor. All we can really tell you is it is a ranking factor that Google uses … but why?
Why does Google think that an older website is of any greater value than a website that has just appeared?
Google wants to trust your website
Well, perhaps it’s got a lot to do with trust because there was a time when it was quite possible to get a brand-new website to rank well on the first page of the search results for almost any important search term.
Of course, those new sites were fairly thin on content and what content there was on those sites was often scraped … copied … or re-purposed from other sites. That was not such a problem for Google until ensuring that they were giving their users the best possible results became an issue.
If you want to keep people coming back for more then you want to give them a very good reason for coming back and, for Google, that meant giving their users the sites that delivered the best possible information.
In most instances that meant that Google needed to send searchers to the original source of that information and wouldn’t have taken Google long to work out that the original source was probably the website that had been online the longest.
You need to be patient
So, the age of a website became a ranking factor and the newer the site the less chance it had of ranking for any search term until it had been around long enough for Google to begin to trust it.
In fact, we have now reached the point now where Google suggests that it takes them around 12 months to list a new website.
That doesn’t mean that every new website is going to have to live in some other dimension until it matures. Some websites will pop up in the search results much sooner but if you new website deals with an industry or a niche where you already have lots of competition then the chances of you outranking those older websites is a lot less.
It seems that Google thinks that a good website is like a fine wine … it needs to mature a little.
