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The Google Aging Delay Conspiracy
Aging Delay Filter - Google Aging Delays
by John Hughes
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk
Last updated: 9 Oct 2007
Apparently, Google delays ranking new web pages. It must be true – I have read it on other SEO websites! The story goes as follows:
Google "sandbox" new web pages to prevent new pages ranking quickly. This filter (depending on whose opinion you read) applies only to certain search phrases, and is nothing new.
The evidence of the supposed aging filter is that new web pages don’t rank well immediately for the phrases for which they are optimised.
The apparent justification for the existence of the supposed sandbox or aging filter is that it is to prevent sites launching new pages and buying thousands of links quickly. If it didn't sandbox them, they would jump to the top of the search Rankings within a few weeks of launch before Google could spot the spamtastic nature of their SEO technique. The aging filter forces new pages into the sandbox for a fixed period (6 weeks, 3 months, six months – depends whose opinion you listen to) which then have no way of ranking until they clear the sandbox.
Now as it happens, the theory and discussion about sandboxing has been around for a while. It has been consistently rebutted by our empirical research, and likewise by application of logic.
Imagine for a moment that you are Google:
You have an Index of eight billion web pages, so many that you use two distinct indices to speed up search, one of which you only dip into if you don’t get enough results from the first.
Your primary purpose is to provide relevant results to users’ searches. You need to be up-to-date when users search for news, or for new products or fads, perhaps up and coming pop artists and so on. You want to be the search engine of choice when people are looking to buy the new iPhone, reading about the new series of Bones on Fox or Sky, or wondering who got sent off for Chelsea on Saturday.
Why on earth complicate your already resource-hungry algorithm with one that deliberately prevents new pages from ranking?
We have carried out experiments to prove that good rankings can be achieved on new pages – we achieved a front page listing for the term "Google Boogie" on a brand new page in less than ten days.
"Google Boogie" is obviously not that competitive a phrase to rank for, and that is the point. The more competitive a phrase is, the more embedded your link profile must be, and the stronger your Content must be in order to compete. The links that point at you page must ALL be re-indexed to get their effect, and the links pointing to the pages that link to your page must all be re-indexed and so on.
Buying hundreds or thousands of links won’t necessarily speed things up because re-indexing of links takes time, and Google proactively ignore PageRank transfer along paid-for links anyhow.
New domains, on the other hand, do count against you to begin with. Google have a patent describing precisely how WHOIS information is used to determine the trustfulness of a site by determining how recently the domain was registered (and interestingly by who – Google would seem to have a list of people they DON’T trust!).
And so we come full circle. There is no aging filter for new web pages. They idea is frankly absurd. However, proper investigation does prove that, in principle, Google do take the age of a domain into account when deciding how much to trust a website. As it happens, this makes more sense, and is another reason why people experience a "sandbox effect" when they launch a new site. In fact it is entirely why you should launch a holding page long before your site is ready to launch.
Also, don’t register a domain under the name "Bill Gates." Just a thought.
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