Is it just me... or does it take much longer to see rankings results these days?

I've been creating and ranking web sites since I was in high school. Obviously Google has changed a lot since then. One of the things I'm noticing these days is it feels like it takes so long for a web site to respond in the rankings anymore.

You can attract super high quality links, make fantastic content, get a social media following... all of it. Yet I've still seen sites like this take as long as a year to truly "pop"

1. Am I crazy, or is EVERYTHING taking longer these days? Is Google's algorithm just more skeptical than ever?
2. Do you have any white hat strategies for ranking a new site faster in Google?

 

No you are not crazy. It is logical that ranking takes much longer now. That is because people are competing for medium to low competition keywords. People are getting smarter and adapting white hat techniques.

The more time passes the more topics are covered and competed at. So it's gonna get more competitive the following years as well.

Sad but true.

 

The ONLY thing that will prevent your site from being ranked is by not getting the site indexed. ALL webpages are INSTANTLY ranked when they are indexed.

Apparently your pages are not getting indexed in a suitable time frame. You might try submitting the pages DIRECTLY to Google via Google's webmaster tools. My experience there says that Google will index your pages shortly after submitting them. And once indexed they are AUTOMATICALLY ranked by Google.

 

Google doesn't take more time. It has bettered itself through years of process.

Its hard to say why your sites are taking long time with this little information. But this much I can tell you if Google is taking more time to get you ranked than usual, it may be for the reason that your pages are not seemed worthy to Google or it is having a hard time evaluating your pages & measure their merit.

 

it take lot of time to rank on google search page, I'm just like you, a blogger/business owner that's looking to get more traffic to my blog. I've struggled with this in the past. Over the past year I've been pushing my payments blog hard. I've been investing a lot of time and money into this. In the past 12 months I've taken it from 10k uniques to over 1 million uniques. I've learned a few things along the way.

 

Maybe 10 - 12 years back, Google got so fast at indexing a site that you could see somewhat stable results in as quick as 24 - 48 hours. It remained that way, from my perspective, for a few years. But then again from my perspective, I believe they realized that by indexing SEO changes so quickly, they were showing their cards and making it easy for SEOs to reverse engineer the algorithm. Back then you could really see the exact results of your changes.

I've heard other SEOs with a similar opinion, and I now often wait 1 - 2 weeks for changes to be fully indexed and influence ranking. Mueller even recently said that sometimes results aren't instant and can even take months. But I believe they have the capacity to do it faster.

 

Google has gotten more strict with its algorithms and guidelines, removing spam and promoting quality content are amongst the top priorities. If you follow these guidelines and create relevant and quality content, your rankings are sure to go up after a certain level of time, so people will only love you if Google loves you first!