No Free Ride For New Sites, Even SEO Sites!

The Website for WebTalent is a new site on a new domain. After being uploaded and made fully live, I submitted it two a couple social bookmarking sites that get crawled regularly (like Digg and Propeller). Knowing that Google most likely visits these sites multiple times a day it would stand to reason that Google and other search engines would be able to crawl my site faster than finding it on their own. This proved true, as when I woke up the next morning all of my pages in my site had been indexed (not bad for one shot deal). I was even surprised to see first page rankings for some of of the small and less competitive keywords. I checked today and it has disappeared from the index. There are a couple explanations (or theories) on why this happens to new sites like mine. One theory is that Google index's news sites differently than older more trusted sites. New sites tend to move around a bit until they have proven their relevance and gained some level of respect from the search engines. The Second is the Google Sand Box Theory. This is not to be confused with getting banned from a site due to unethical practices. Sandbox Theory places a filter on new sites for a short period of time (can be one week or 1 year) until they have matured and built relevancy. Rumor has it that they are they restored to a more appropriate ranking position.

As I mentioned one of these has happened to this site and I will be using this time to continue marketing and performing SEO activities to monitoring the results. I think that this is a perfect opportunity to see how long it takes for a new site to settle in with rankings and to see where it lands, especially in the hotly competitive SEO terms we are optimized for.

Today is March 12, 2009. I'll keep you posted on when the site shows back up in google's index and where.

 Events: 

March 13, 2009 : back in the index but only my home page and my contact page. Looks like google has uploaded an older version of the homepage while it was in beta.. hmmm

 March 15 2009: All pages back up in the index and ranking well for the locally optimized pages.

It is not uncommon for pages to jump around a bit on new sites like mine. I'm sure that the rankings will jump around from here on out. It's important to keep building quality imbound links and adding quality content. Still very interesting though. : )