A blog for students of Professor Kagan's Digital Marketing Strategy course to comment and highlight class topics. From the various channels for marketing on the internet, to SaaS and e-commerce business models, anything related to the class is fair game.
Monday, June 06, 2011
Tough life for new websites!
After last Friday class, I realized how new websites could be quite penalized by the way Google SEO ranking works. The “tenure” factor can highly influence the website position in the ranking through the off-page optimization elements and users traffic. Considering everything else as equal, an older website is more likely to be assessed as hub or authority and to have a higher number of backlinks and a user traffic. However even if the new website has a higher quality it will take quite a lot of time to offset the tenure effect in the ranking. Before coming to Columbia I was helping the launch of a web-based family business focused on conventions (i.e., search engine for convention locations in Italy). When the web-site was launched, the incumbent company was on the web since at least 5 years. Even though our website had better content, better design and better database, it was constantly ranked much lower than the incumbent. As our limited advertising budget didn’t allow us to invest in any other media rather than internet, it was extremely difficult for us to raise users traffic. Looking at SEO has one of the most powerful and cheapest way of advertising, especially on highly web-based industries, shouldn’t Google try to select measures that focus more on the quality rather than the tenure of the website?
Hey De Mattia,
ReplyDeleteI seems like you are much worried about the tenure. In my experience tenure does count in evaluating by most of the search engines but it has less weight. Means it is not of a high importance if your site has a better content. One key to this is the uniqueness of your contents rewarded higher as compare to the contents that is copied from other site or referenced.
Don't be so worried about the tenure, I have done this with very new sites with new domains.In fact take it that way. It is easy to make reputation when no one knows you in a community and you don't have a negative marketing.
Just focus on the quality of contents, HTML Formatting and Link building and don't forget to list yourself in couple of directories and search engines.