We received an email from one of our readers the other day asking about ranking on Google and how long it can take for new sites to rank favorably.  We took this question and also asked several members on the Google discussion boards and here is the general consensus:

Basically, there is no rule of thumb or straight forward answer that applies to each and every website.  The reason for this is quite simple.  Every website is unique.  Some are full of great content and tailored to highly trafficked and desirable niches or categories where as others may be scrapers, copies, and full of duplicate content.  So, as you can see, Google has a huge task to decipher the worthy or good sites from the bad.  Lately they have been improving a whole lot on how they handle this.

If you have a site that can be seen as spammy or duplicate (even similar or rewritten content gets hammered nowadays - Google has updated their search filters to get all duplicate content and delist it or rank it near the bottom so stay away from copying others content and do not use article submissions anymore) are quickly removed from the que.  Then it goes based upon how relevent and helpful your website is.  A large portion of this is determined by inbound links.  The better the quality of these links the quicker and higher that new site will rank.  This is why government sites almost rank immediately (for instance if the FDA comes out with a new website warning consumers of fake viagra medicine that is hitting American pharmacies and it has come from India or China then you can be assured this website will rank instantly as it will most likely be linked to from the FDA home page and other governemnt sources giving it instant credability).

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This is why so many people in the past would try to buy and sell .gov and .edu links (stay away from paid linksas this will get you caught sooner or later and could result in a penalty and in any case the link will become completely devalued).  Google has also seen lots of blog comment spamming in SEO attempts to get a free .edu, .gov or .org link.  This worked in the early days, but now almost all blog comment links are devalued (SEO's are now using social networking like forums, wiki's, Craigslist, MySPace, Reddit, Twitter and other social platforms to get link juice and traffic - soon Google will be reducing the power of these free social links as it is being way over spammed). 

 

So basically, how quickly a new site ranks depends upon several factors.  It depends upon the site structure, niche, quality and uniqueness of content, the stickyness factor (how long does a reader actually stay on these pages and whether they actually click to other pages on the site or leave immediately), website loading speeds, etc...  This is also why it is essential to use a good, well established hosting service from the start.  You need one with at least 99.9% uptime.  If your site is down when Google comes to crawl it it might be a very long time before Google comes back again. 

Branding and outside work are counting more now than ever and Google has stated this numerous times that they are looking at the whole picture not just your website and internet presence.  Great links and branding (advertising outside of the internet) never hurts.  Some Google employees (JohnMu, I think) stated that to be listed and then ranked well now will require a whole picture which can include things you do outside of the web.  But, if you are starting from complete scratch, have no contacts or outside sales, etc... then it will be as stated above.  There is no definite time frame.  If you instead come into this with an already established name brand or a big advertising campaign (such as NOS energy drinks or the newest line of fashion clothes like Phat Farm, Sean John or something similar) then you will be up and ranking quickly. 

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Not everyone has millions of dollars and huge advertising budgets and that is okay.  You can still gain a large presence on the internet with your website.  It will just take more work and you need to go after links and content.  Be sure and get natural links (competitors can easily search your inbound linksand will report any spammy or possibly paid links to Google and they will be quickly devalued) and then add only unique and helpful content.  Product reviews that are well written tend to do quite well lately.  Just be sure and be truthful and as detailed as possible.  Never do false reviews (like a knowingly false review of a competitors product to derank them) as they can easily be found as libel (the written form of slander) and sued for - in most cases the judge involved will turn over the offending website to the plaintiff.  You definitely don't want to lose your hard earned website for something childish do you?

The bigger your brand the more important it is to Google that you rank well for your domain name and brand names (else you could have a cocaine article or drug paraphernalia showing at #1 for coke instead of Coca-cola).  Coca-cola owns the top 7 rankings for the keyword coke (this of course is followed by some Yahoo that is upset about Cokes not very green or helpful image in other countries and has a website called killercoke.org). Coca-cola has only 300 or so pages indexed so you can clearly see the importance of its outside branding and the high level of trust Google associates with it (else killercoke might outrank them). So, the bottom line is that for the quickest listing and ranking on Google branding, outside advertising and the total picture is very important.  Size, links and unique content will determine a large part of how quickly your new site ranks.