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Old web pages dominate the first page of Google’s search results and new pages less than one year old represent only 0.3 percent of the top ten Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for 2 million randomly selected keywords.
The Web Site Group prepared the following infographic based on a study by Ahrefs, a marketing tools company. It shows that the position of a website in Google’s results is a function of its age rather than on its content alone.
It’s an important discovery because businesses large and small worry constantly about their position in Google’s search. Every business wants to be on the first page of ten links returned for a Google search for their keywords. And they will spend large sums on search engine optimization (SEO) services and tools that promise to improve Google ranking.
The Ahrefs analysis appears to show that businesses could be wasting huge amounts of money and energy on SEO in vain attempts to rank higher on Google, which could end up having the opposite result.
Google punishes companies that use SEO that goes beyond the basics in its web master guidelines because it sees it as a flagrant attempt to manipulate its search rankings — it’s the mark of a spammer.
Google uses a secret method to determine the keyword rank of a webpage — assessing more than 200 factors. Some SEO practices that used to be common such as buying links on other sites will now cause Google to lower the rank of the web site because of this clear marker of attempted SERP manipulation.
With the content marketing trend many businesses are trying to produce high quality content according to Google’s claim that it will rank such pages higher. Businesses will test the content of a web page with tools that determine a likely ranking by Google. But there is no similar testing for human readers.
I’ve always advised businesses to shun the SEO practices of the day and focus on making sure their web site is focused on people and not bots.
Create content for human visitors and not the Googlebot. The bot will come back but the human might not.
Trust takes time to build and SEO tricks won’t build it faster. It takes time to rank highly in Google and that’s the way it should be.
Here is the infographic of the Ahrefs study:
Ahref and The Website Group
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