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Google’s Senior Webmaster Analyst John Mueller stated that it could take as long as a year for the search engine to understand where to rank new websites. There can be fluctuations for the new websites in the rankings during the first year, which is completely normal as Mueller says and it has nothing to do whether the website is performing well or poorly.
This query came up because a site owner was affected by negative SEO with 1500 malicious backlinks was done by a competitor, and the owner of the site said that the rankings fell drastically. For now, the website is nowhere to be found. And the website owner wants to know how to get back on the top.
John Mueller’s Response
Mueller advises the website admin that their 8-month-old website is considered new. Google is still researching the procedure of how the website should be positioned with the content present on the webpage.
“I think if your website is just, let’s say, a couple of months old, maybe 8 months, maybe a year, then that’s still very fresh with regards to the rest of the internet. So that’s kind of a time where our algorithms are still trying to figure out how and where we should show your website in the search results overall.
So that’s something where it would be normal to see some kind of fluctuations around how it’s being shown in search. Sometimes things go up for a while, sometimes they go down for a while. And then, I’d say over the course of a year, things settle down in kind of a stable state.
So that’s something where I wouldn’t necessarily worry too much about this particular situation. I’d continue working on your website, and over time that’s something that should be reflected in search overall.”
What about Spammy links?
The website owner draws Mueller’s attention to the malicious links and asks as they could contrarily affect rankings.
Mueller affirms, as he has expressed previously, that Google’s algorithms disregard those sorts of links.
“That’s something that we see all the time. It’s really easy for people to run a script and to drop thousands and millions of links on the internet and we ignore that. That’s something where people get really busy, and they do all this crazy stuff, but our algorithms have seen it so often they’re used to just ignoring it…”
Ultimately, the website owner inquires with Mueller about the spammy links being disavowed as a precautionary step.
“I don’t think you need to. I don’t think that would change anything. I would just completely ignore it.
If your competitor is focused on building bad links for your website then at least they’re not making a better website for themselves.”
