Does SEO Differ Depending on the Age of a Site?

After being responsible for quite a few different sites’ SEO for a while now, and reviewing the work done by my colleagues, this is a question we have been posing recently.

A short time ago, I came across a system developed by another SEO company that they used to evaluate customers’ sites to work out the ability of the site to rank for particular keywords. Pretty much on the principle that some sites are not capable of gunning for competitive keywords. This formalises a process that almost every decent SEO agency goes through when evaluating keywords. It is important to choose keywords that will drive traffic to the site, but it is equally important to not choose a list of keywords that are so far out of sight that no results will come about.

So, to the question – Does SEO Differ Depending on the Age of a Site?

Yes, it does, but mainly because age is one function of authority. It is authority that really matters to the search engines, measured by their particular metrics, but mainly defined by inbound links.

So the SEO process differs considerably for different sites. For an older, established site, the SEO process consists of re-shaping the way that the search engines view the site. For a high authority site, (say a Page Rank 5 or 6, if you are used to thinking in those terms), correcting the page titles and fixing crawling issues can give a fairly instant effect (in an average industry), with a considerable boost in the number of searches that the site appears for. The SEO here is to do with adjusting the site to be better for its chosen keywords (using on and off-page optimisation), so that the authority of the site is turned into real rankings.

For a low authority site (with a PR of 0 or 1, say), this process doesn’t have the same kind of effect – the site just isn’t on the search engines’ radar. These changes help, but the site doesn’t get crawled often and the site languishes down the rankings. The SEO process here is a different procedure, building the site’s authority with the engines. Only when the site reaches a certain threshold of authority does all the other work on the site kick in. In old parlance, it was about getting the site out of the Google Supplemental Index. It might not exist in name any longer, but the effects attributed to it still affect sites to this day.

So what does this mean for the average marketing manager buying search engine optimisation? Well, if you have a new domain, it may mean that you have to wait a bit longer for results, so SEO becomes a more long term process. Alternatively, be prepared to bring more to the party, using offline marketing processes like PR to help drive the SEO, or allocate someone internally to be responsible for linkbait, social media and blogging to help raise the visibility of your site online.

In truth, most sites sit somewhere between these poles, and it is a combination of techniques that paves the way to better results, but that is where the skills of the SEO agency come in.