Google said Ranking of new sites can fluctuate for up to a year

John Mueller from Google recently advised that it could take up to a year for the search engine to figure out where to rank new websites. During this time, it is more likely that rankings for your website can fluctuate.

This behaviour is completely normal, and you do not need to worry that your website is doing something wrong or right.

This topic came out during a Google Webmaster Central hangout organized on June 12. A concerned webmaster raised the question about his 8-month old website, which was ranking well approx. a month ago.

The website owner found that ranking drops coincided with a negative SEO attack by his competitor which resulted in very 1500 spammy backlinks. Now the site is not found in search results and he wanted to know how to recover from this?

In response, John Mueller informed that it is quite a common thing and your site is still considered very fresh. In comparison to the history of the Internet, 8 months is very less time and our algorithms are still trying to figure out how and where we should show your website in search rankings.

 So, that is almost normal to see fluctuations around how it is being shown in search. Sometimes, things can go up for a while and sometimes they go down for a while. although, these things settle down in a year.

All you should focus on this time is to continue working on the website and over time that is something that should be reflected in overall search.

Suggestions for Spammy backlinks

The site owner asked again about the spammy links and asks if they could be negatively impacting rankings.

Mueller stated, “That’s something that we see all the time. It’s really easy for people to run a script and to drop thousands and millions of links on the internet and we ignore that. That is something where people get busy, and they do all this crazy stuff, but our algorithms have seen it so often they’re used to just ignoring it…”

The last things that Mueller cleared to the website owner, you do not need to think about spammy links more and ignore those links.

He said, “If your competitor is focused on building bad links for your website then at least they’re not making a better website for themselves.”

So, if you have made a new website for your business and concerned about the fluctuating rankings, this conversation can help you.