I was just reading Emily’s blog about the supplemental index (that isn’t the supplemental index any more). This is the second time this year that we have written about this huge jump in rankings for a client.
We talk a lot about increasing the authority of a website, and the ‘removal’ of the supplemental index gave us a bit of an issue about what to call this problem when a site was experiencing it!
I still come across people talking about the Google Sandbox, which pretty much describes the same thing – a new website takes a while to get prominence. I’ve never prescribed to the length of time concept sometimes attached to the sandbox – there are too many new sites that spring up and start ranking well soon after launch. What links these sites though is that they are often launched in a burst of publicity, and this generates a large number of links in a very short time. Thus the site gets more authority (or removed from the supplemental rankings or sandbox or whatever you want to call it) earlier in its life cycle.
I tend to think of this as an authority level – until a site reaches a certain authority level, it won’t start to rank for anything apart from the most minor keywords. Once it has broken thorough this ceiling, rankings then tend to grow steadily. This authority level is generally related to inbound links – all the on-page optimisation in the world won’t get your site to rank for a phrase if no-one links to you.
It is possible to hold back your site from ranking, even when it has the authority, by bad on-page content, or by bad site integrity. But as we also know, some sites tend to rank for competitive keywords despite terrible on-site problems, which is when the authority is so strong that those issues are dwarfed by the profile of the site.
There are so many elements in the algorithm for ranking at Google that no one thing really is the “killer” element for search engine optimisation, and even this explanation is my way of visualising it to myself. Your site and the links to it exist as an entity, and a holistic approach is required to make all the parts of the SEO process work in harmony. To make a site appear in the search listings where it is relevant for it to do so is the goal for the site owner, the SEO and for Google.
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