Changing your website’s content is a dangerous move in Google
September 14, 2006 – 6:07 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
When it comes to Google traffic, you risk a lot by changing your website’s content. I’ve been forced to do it on occassion, and I have to say, a brand new domain seems to perform much better than a site that has had it’s main content changed.
First off, it takes Google a long time to even recognize the changes correctly.
Secondly, their “Trustrank” factor, or whatever, seems to quarantine the pages in the proverbial sandbox. This is a strange reaction to a webmaster. Here’s what I tested:
I wrote a simple search engine friendly script for a social bookmarking website. I’ve put it up on a new domain (PR 0) and an old one (PR6). Both sites are being crawled and indexed fast. But the pages in the PR6 website are “dead” for all intents and purposes.
Even though they show using the site: command, they don’t rank for ANYTHING. The PR0 website gets 70% of it’s traffic from Google and the changed website gets 0.13%. This is after one month.
This, to me, is proof of the strange new algo and it’s huge emphasis on “trust”. Realistically, I’m having much better success with new domains than certain old ones that have caught The Google Ick.
This system is crazy, IMHO. I’m not even sure it’s intentional. But basically punishing users of legitimate websites for changing content on their own site is crazy. Google is really really slow to recognize changes, and seems to even have a “Permanent Record” of any mis-doings your website may have done in the best. I’m not sure that such a bias un unexplained criteria should exist, especially in such a popular search engine.
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4 Responses to “Changing your website’s content is a dangerous move in Google”
I’ve been told the same from webmasters, don’t change your site totally, else expect very bad results from google.
By TechZ on Sep 14, 2006
The trouble is: sometimes you have to do it.
I’m experimenting with ways to do it now.
By Darren McLaughlin on Sep 14, 2006
Hi ! That’s point of view is interesting but I disagree. If you create a new domain, you have to create your trust rank, your page rank and your local rank. I agree with the fact that, with a new domain, Google will react fastly. However, are you sure that changing a domain name is a good thing for your site if content and domain name are not opposed ?
By Ramenos on Sep 15, 2006
I disagree with you too Ramenos
I have a TON of proof that brand new domains are ranking well right now. I’ve launched 3 brand new websites since July which all rank well.
Of course they have trusted links from other existing sites. I think that’s the key.
Just so you know too, Pagerank is created the moment that Google discovers the page. It’s just that Google only updates it visibily 4 times a year or so.
If your domain is penalized: YOU NEVER GET OUT! Who can spend all this time waiting around?
By Darren McLaughlin on Sep 15, 2006