Google Search Rank Improves With Website Age

One of the key factors in Google search ranking is website age. And due to the influence of website age Google intentionally imposes a ranking delay on new websites while they prove their trustworthiness. According to Evan Bailyn, one of the world's leading authorities on SEO, this holdback, or inability to rank, lasts about four years and decreases in progressively smaller amounts over this time. This handicap is why a new auto repair website on a new domain name with no history takes much longer to work its way up in search result position than a new website on a well seasoned domain name. Like a good red wine, website Google rank improves with the passage of time.

Why the Holdback

Google keeps a close watch on its search house and if you violate their trust you will not be welcome. Play by Google's rules and they will reward your auto repair website with an increasing ability to rank on competitive keywords. Break the rules and your website will languish for a long time at the bottom of the search results. This is all an effort to keep SPAM and junk websites out of their search engine. This ranking delay is frustrating for legitimate website owners, but it effectively discourages spammers and crooks from throwing together a website, quickly ranking well, ripping off a bunch of people, shutting down the website, and doing it all again. Google's objective is to make websites prove their worth over an extended period of time so only the trustworthy websites survive. The question for website owners is how long do you have to wait?

Holdback Timeline

A new website, regardless of how well it is constructed or how many back-links it has, will be held back from ranking on popular keywords. After Google fully crawls your new website it then starts to  monitor its behavior and award it a trust rank. No one but Google knows for sure how long this process takes but Evan Bailyn speculates, based on his experience and testing, that the holdback new websites experience follows the timeline as shown in the following table:

Estimated Google Holdback on New Websites

I fully agree with Evan and would say his timeline is quite accurate. From my experience new websites built on a new domain name do take an extended period of time to show their true ranking power. In comparison, a new website built on a previously used domain name will retain the previous website's ranking, and move up in ranking much quicker if the new website has better SEO*.

*Of course the ranking transfer from the old to the new website only works IF the new website has been setup with properly configured URL redirects.

Backlink Aging

Another very important factor in your website ranking is the age of your website's backlinks. The older the links are the greater the value that Google awards them. This stops websites from “renting” links from high-ranking websites to boost their ranking. Google likes and rewards quality and stability for both website content and links from other websites. Another reason to start work on improving your auto repair website SEO.

Faster Website Ranking

The next big question for website owners is how long do you want to wait?

So what can auto repair website owners do to improve their search results while their websites “age” and Google begins to trust them? Other than improving your auto repair SEO and being patient, the only alternative is to use paid search ads such as Google's AdWords. Paid ads are an excellent way to instantly drive traffic to your auto repair website and test which keywords are the best to focus your auto repair website SEO on. While your website slowly works its way to the top of the organic search results AdWords lets you “pay” your way into Google's search results. Paid ads are a great way to find the most productive keywords and give you an immediate taste of being number one!

Bottom Line

A quality website that attracts viewers and converts them into new customers takes time to gain Google love and work its way to the top of the organic search results. Patience and effective auto repair SEO will eventually get you there. And if you want to speed up the process a Google AdWords campaign can help bridge the time gap and make your phone start ringing a lot sooner.

If you need help with auto repair SEO please contact me.