I'm reaching the point where I think that Google practices a little too much age discrimination. If you have a site that has been around 10 years or more, you are golden with Google. No offense to anyone, but you could produce a really weak site -- bad design and poorly written content, updates from just forums and nothing else -- and still get highly ranked if you launched it back in the late '90s or early 2000s. I've seen it done many times. If you have a newer site and spend hundreds of hours over a couple of years on search engine optimization, article marketing and every other tactic, you still have a big fight on your hands to get a decent ranking for moderately important keywords. If you're lucky enough to find a niche that doesn't have a lot of competition, maybe you'll do better. OK, I'm over my Monday morning blues. Back to work.
thats not age discrimination. over time with age, some things get better and gain credibility. google just takes those things into account. reason for not assigning new sites higher ranking so easily is to cut down on spam. most of the spammers launch new site and start spamming and google dont want to assign any ranking for those sites for which the sandbox is. just think about it...if you go to a lawyer who just graduated form school and your case is his first case. he will charge you one kind of fees compared to an old lawyer who has been practicing law for 20 years. experience and credibility comes with age. in certain businesses however, it works the opposite way. older the hooker is, lower she will charge for example
I understand what you're saying, but I could go to a lawyer who has been in business for 20 years assuming he has credibility and experience, but I find out he's a lousy lawyer who has simply hung in there. I wasn't saying all older sites are bad sites, just that some older sites get very high SEO rankings even though they are bad sites. Age and quality don't always go together.
Great point, and I agree to an extent, but I think that from Google's perspective, they just don't want to rank new sites as highly as they may be here today, gone tommorow websites set up by someone who is purely after making a quick buck.
How exactly does google track/disregard spam backlinks? Does anyone know? They recently cut a bunch from our site and our organic search result suffered.
Well the age discrimination will be good for you too if you hang in there. There has to be some perks to hanging in there longer than the countless drop-outs.
There are a number of indicators to Google that they use to check for spam links: the speed/rate at which the links are built, the relevance of the sites that link in, the type of link (blog, social media, forum etc)... In early June I saw a lot of websites lose their inbound link counts but PR was relatively unaffected; I see this as Google making good their commitment to cut down on web spam and spam comments & links. This can only be a good thing and means that if those so-called SEOs who promise a link-building strategy by comment spamming find they're wasting their time then that's fine by me - if only quality, relevant IBLs count then I'm happy with that too.
It isn't a problem at all. You can also buy these domains. If your website have more backlinks(quality backlinks) and more content you will be higher in SERPs.
"There are a number of indicators to Google that they use to check for spam links: the speed/rate at which the links are built" So does google disregard comment links that seem to be clustered in one or two sites, submitted in the same day?
I think they are thinking more on the order of hundreds or thousands of links submitted in a few days. Then again, and I like to say this, look how quickly breaking news articles rank, and they get thousands of links in a day.
The Big G says that age doesn't matter too much, rather trust and credibility http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1_1NQWQJ2Q
Are the links rel=nofollow? Is this a one-off or is this a regular pattern of commenting/link-building? As Groovystar says, there has to be a significant level of links in order to be flagged. With breaking news the source site(s) will most often be reputable or established; of course anyone can break news but how often will a cheap, spammy little MFA scraper site actually break news?