Google’s Aging Delay: It’s Just a Matter of Time

There is such a thing as a Google aging delay. Some people call it the Google sandbox, but it is more rightly called the Google’s aging delay, so named because it is the probationary “maturing” period for newly indexed sites.

The Function of Google’s Aging Delay

Google has set up this search engine results page or SERP-filtering mechanism to weed out “bad’ and “faddish” sites from their search engine results. Google’s main objective is to deliver only relevant and credible web sites to their search engine users. The only way that Google can maintain its spot as the search engine of choice is by ensuring that their users continue to get only relevant search results and not get spam and artificially enhanced web sites.

Google Page Rank Rating and SERP explained

As you know, the main basis for a page’s position on Google SERP depends on a site’s relevance to a keyword query. This relevance is measured by Google through its page rank algorithm.

One major factor in a web site’s Google page rank rating is the number of quality and relevant links that point to the site. The reason behind this goes this way: if other web pages link to your site, your site must have important content, and if these pages that link to you are important (they have a high Google page rank on your keyword) and they have related content, the more relevant your web page is and the more useful Google users will find your content to be. As such, your site will get a high page rank rating for the keyword/s involved and you are going to get a commensurate position in Google SERPs.

Artificially relevant web sites

Knowing how Google rates web pages for relevance, some web masters found a way to get ahead of the Google SERP and page rank game through active link building (autolinking, reciprocal linking and one-way linking). Some people also built multiple web sites just so one-way links from contrived sites can be generated and count towards the main site’s page rank rating. Thus, some sites were able to get to the top of SERP and attain high page rank by virtue of some clever maneuverings.

Google’s Answer: The Google Aging Delay Mechanism

The Google’s aging delay is a filter set forth by Google that prevents new sites from being displayed in search engine results pages (SERP) for any keyword. Even if you launch your site fully optimized and with many links from quality and relevant web pages, all you can hope to gain for this new web site is a few days on top of SERPs then 6-8 months of complete obscurity.

This doesn’t mean that Google has not indexed your page or that you have zero page rank rating. In fact, if you initiate a search using other web sites, you will realize that you are consistently gaining one of the top spots in these search engines’ results pages. Google simply refuses to display your web site to its users for a set period of time. There are no exceptions to this aging phase and there’s no way to get around this Google delaying mechanism. All you can do for the moment is continue submitting your site to open directories like dmoz, pay for paid advertising so your ad can appear on SERP anyway, and use the aging period to fine tune your site for better positions with other search engines’ SERP.