Links to Rankings – A Test Of Wills
One of the biggest changes in the seo world in the last few years is the time it can take to rank a website, particularly in Google. A bit back Rand noted that even established "trusted" domains were taking 10+ weeks to see some traction in terms of higher rankings after building links to these pages. The amount of patience needed to see results is even greater when talking about new domains.
Our own LinkBuildingBlog.com has not earned top rankings in Google until just the last few weeks when we have spotted our blog jump from out of the 100′s for "link building" all the way to the top 10 on most data centers. We registered the domain May 12, 2005 and our first post was May 16, 2005. Our blog was a site that seemed to receive all the right links since the first day Andy and I started posting. A quick search on Yahoo shows over 20,000 links into our domain! Even with this nice linkage from many quality sites it seemed we had to wait for our domain to age past that magic one year mark before we saw what we thought made sense for our blog… a top 10 ranking.
The good news for new sites is I have personally seen three unique sites (12 to 14 months old) that I track recently break out of no where into the top 15 on Google with their latest index tweaks. Andy is also reporting some sites that were created much more recently showing signs of ranking in Google much faster than what we have seen in the last year. Now we all know results can be seen in MSN and Yahoo much faster but the holy grail is top Google rankings for most sites. As a very general rule for link building (always exceptions of course)…
Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.
New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results.
There you have it, I have oversimplified a very complicated issue. Readers, what are you seeing in terms of time it is taking you to see traction in search rankings after building new links?
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Comments
I get links from submitting articles but it's slow.
What are your best methods for gaining links?
Herman
I've got a personal site that was launched in April of '05. It was buried in the Google sandbox until about a week or two ago when Google started it's very odd update (I don't think these current results are set in stone; there seem to be 3 sets of very different results that are toggling between data centers; everyone is seeing this). Now I'm in the top 5 on a very competitive keyword.
I'm happy at the moment, but I'm concerned the ranking won't stick...
I think the "Sandbox" effect depends largely on the inbound links' duration/age, the link relevancy, and how natural a sites' link-development-progression appears.
I hope you can give me some tips. I will greatly appreciate it.
Thank you and more power!
Similarly, I have a client who gets 500 referrals a day from Google within two months on organic results alone too.
If I had to give away one tip, spread out your link development. You don't want a ton of links on day one. You want them spread out over time. This isn't the best tip, but it helps. Okay, one more.. make sure any domain you register is for at least two years. Google pays attention to this.
I have created a site (on new domani) on October 29th and have done some link building (150 links) and content writing (50 pages). In 6 months sharp I started seeing traffic trickle from Google on one of my main keywords. Judging by the amount of competition, I am out of the sandbox in a half a year, not in promised 12-16 months.