It's time for this week's Throwback Thursday Daily Golden Nugget. I'm jumping back to March 2011 to my discussion of Older, Wiser, Faster Indexed Websites to specifically revisit the difference between new websites and old websites, and how Google indexes them.
New Websites
People don't race to shop at your store as soon as you build a new website. Before that can happen, Google needs to learn about your business, services, and products then it needs to figure out how to correctly match what you offer to what people search for online. Much to the chagrin of website owners, this doesn't happen overnight; in fact it might take more than 30 days.
However, before the countdown of those 30 days can begin Google must first find out about your website. How they find out depends on how you tell them. You can tell them using one of these methods:
- Link to your new website from an existing website
- Submit a Sitemap through your Google Search Console account
- Submit your site to Google using their http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/ page
In my opinion, linking to your site from another site is the best method for getting your new website found. Google continually crawls the internet in search of new links. Every link provides a little boost of credibility provided by the linking website to the recipient website. This link credibility adds up and helps to increase your website ranking over time.
Submitting your sitemap and your website through the other two methods mentioned above doesn't provide the credibility boost, but it does tell Google that your site exists. Without the linking from other sites Google won't know how credible your site is and if you should be highly ranked in search results. As Google is trying to figure out how to rank your website it's more likely that you'll rank for exact multi-word phrases found on your website than for single keywords or general topics.
For example, it's unlikely you'll rank immediately for "engagement ring," but you might rank for multi-word phrases like "vintage halo diamond engagement ring" if it appears somewhere on your website.
As Google crawls the web, it also keeps a record of how often every website is updated. Websites that are updated often tend to be crawled more often, and may even rank higher for keywords and phrases. Even though the routine content updates help increase Google visitation rate, it's the linking from other sites that usually dictate your ranking. Therefore, as part of your large content building initiatives, you need to give other bloggers and website owners a reason to link their website to yours. This is easy to accomplish if your content is written very well and educational or intriguing.
Redesigned and Rebuilt Websites
Redesigned and rebuilt websites often go through a period where their ranking drops while Google figures out what changed and how to read the website again. It might still take 30 days for this process, but it's likely all the existing links to the site help to maintain most of its ranking during that transition period.
If you've changed the file name structure of the website, then it's a good idea to upload a new Sitemap file through Google Search Console to alert Google of all the changes.
The key point to remember is that it takes a while for new websites to appear in search results, while redesigned websites often lose a bit of their ranking while Google learns what you changed on your website during the redesign.
