23 replies to this topic

[seo_challenged]

I was reading the aging delay sticky thread and was wondering what date google uses for their aging delay? Is it the date the domain was created or the date google first discovered the domain?


aging delay: If your site is less than 6 months old, it is being repressed on Google by some sort of aging delay. Tweaking, linking, resassembling your pages, and begging Google to tell you what is wrong will not help. This could go away at any time, but as of today, we believe this to be the case.

6 months is the earliest we've had anyone report normal rankings for a new site. Some sites are 8-9 months old and still repressed. At this time it is not clear what triggers the removal of this filter. In fact it is not even clear if it is removed on a site-by-site basis. It may even be a case where all sites started within a several week or month timeframe may be released enmasse.

[torka]

I believe it's the date they first index a page from the domain. But keep in mind I don't work for Google, and given all the uncertainties about how the aging delay actually works, I don't know if there's any way to actually test this in any way that would prove conclusive.

--Torka

[seo_challenged]

I see. It's a big mystery.

Seeing that my domain is 5 months old, I was getting ready to get funky, but I guess that will have to wait.

[Randy]

Well, as Torka said nobody really knows for sure.

Is it the first time they know about and spider a site? Or is it keyed to the first time they start seeing links pointing to the site? The two don't have to be the same thing yanno.

If I were planning on anything for a new site I would plan on it being after they started finding links to the site.

[arlen]

I can't add much other than to underline that nothing is definitive. My domain was 'hosted' for 2 years before I actually launched my site. The under construction page had been indexed for a good period of that, presumably my host must have had an index or something that linked to it as Google knew it was there and spidered occasionally. After launch, it was 12 months + ~10 days before I 'emerged' from the aging delay .... that's been over 12 months ago, so time frames may be shorter now, but it seems to be different for every site.

[seo_challenged]

With 6 to 12 months of potential aging delay in google, it's definately a long term wait to see how your site will actually rank in google.

[CTPhil]

I'm not really sure how this relates to the ageing delay, but I have several domains with re-directs to some of my sites, with a keyword rich description, that are coming in pretty high in the serps for those keywords. All I've done is to link to them from my user profile in my own forum. I'm just hoping that they've "aged" by the time I use them.

[seo_challenged]

I am aging while waiting out aging delay.

[Michael Martinez]

seo_challenged, are you concerned about the site in your signature? There are sites that start ranking pretty quickly, depending on what they do and they are competing for. I brought out a new domain earlier this year that hit its target in about two months. It was not a real estate or insurance site, though.

Anyway, you may want to check your internal links. I can find your main site with two URLs and that is usually an indication of split linkage, which is not helpful.

Also, judging by your title tag, I think you may be going for too many expressions on the front page.

Have you requested a site review?

[seo_challenged]

Michael,

I have requested a review. site review

Split linkage?

I really have no idea what split linkage means.

[Randy]

Split linkage, a typical example...

When your site answers to both domain.com and www.domain.com, and there are other sites (and often your own) linking to both versions. The engines start out treating these as two distinct pages, with the links point to domain.com counting towards that page and links to www.domain.com counting for that page.

You can fix it with a little bit of redirect magic so that whenever someone goes to say domain.com they get redirected via a 301 over to www.domain.com.

[seo_challenged]

I have a 301 redirect already to redirects the non-www to the www version.

I am pretty sure that's working so I am still confused by Michaels comments.

[Michael Martinez]

Randy's answer is technically correct, but there are many ways you can develop split linkage. He just picked the most common example, which is not the problem I saw on your site.

In your case, you have both "example.com" and "example.com/index.php" showing in the Google index. They are two different addresses for the same page that have their own links pointing to them.

Hence, you are getting split linkage.

You need to have all your links either point to the domain name alone or the domain name plus "index.php" if you have mixed linking styles internally.

If other people are linking to your site differently from the way you link to it, I'm not sure what you can do. I once crashed a server by trying to redirect an index page to itself to compensate for a similar problem.

I don't recommend you try that. Not unless someone with more technical savvy than me can explain the right way to do it.

[seo_challenged]

Actually, I think Jill mentioned something about that before. I had removed all references to index.php in the src files but the main page is part of IPB portal, which uses index.php?act=Help and other dynamic references. Not sure how to fix that with the SE's.

I do see google has both versions, but am not sure how to fix that. I guess I could do a rewrite in .htaccess. Something like rewriting /index.php?act=Help to /help.html. Not sure that would fix anything since like I said this is all built on Invision Power Board forums.

Oh what to do.


Edit:

Now that I think about and look at it further, all dynamic pages should be seen as url friendly html pages based on my .htaccess configuration. So, I am wondering where google is seeing index.php, unless my .htaccess and robots.txt aren't working properly.

Edited by seo_challenged, 30 August 2006 - 08:52 PM.

[Randy]

Pages like index.php?act=Help or index.php?anyvariable=something are usually okay seo_challenged. Unless you're doing some additional rewriting of URLs and those shouldn't be showing in the SERPs at all.

I haven't looked at the site in question, but based upon what Michael says he's seen, the main thing that could be splitting your link juice is www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php

What kind of server are you on? If it's a Unix/Linux -> Apache system you may be able to use something we've discussed around here a few times before. In fact, I think the original time it came up was concerning a forum as well.

Do a search of the forums for the phrase THE_REQUEST --with the underscore in there-- and you should find these threads. As Michael mentioned, you have to be careful not to throw the server into an endless loop when trying to work with the default index files. Apache's THE_REQUEST is the perfect tool to use for such situations since it keys to the actual user's request and not where the server happens to be pulling the file from.