Popularity Is Bad
Darren Rowse has a good article at WebProNews explaining the dangers of having a site that becomes very popular in a short period of time. While (obviously) a very popular new site will be getting lots of visitors (that is the definition of popularity), they won’t be coming from search engines, no matter how many thousands of inbound links you score. That’s because any brand new site accumulating huge numbers of hits smells of search spam to any intelligent search engine. While Darren advises to start growing your site slowly, I say to hell with it. If your site is getting so many links that Google is watching you closely, then you are already doing just fine. Ride the wave of popularity, and in a few months, Google and all the other engines will catch on.
You’re right Nathan - the ‘go slow’ advice isn’t really the the crux of what I was advising - I guess what I was hoping to do with the post was explain why sometimes such a ‘popular’ site doesn’t catch on with Google.
I too would advise just to go for it - but in the mean time not to get frustrated with Google’s wary approach to your site and to blog on regardless as it will catch up with you at some later point.
Not that any of us really control how fast or slow anyone else links to us - not sure how I’d slow my popularity down short of abusing my readers
Comment by Darren Rowse | June 2, 2005
Popular Newly Launched Websites–good or bad?
Nathan Weinberg, from Inside Google, comments on an interesting article today regarding whether newly launched sites which are experiencing numerous visits, are suspect in the eyes of the search engines. It would seem that a new site which is experienc…
Trackback by SEOToolSet Blog | June 2, 2005
Interesting article. I must ask. Is there any reason why Google is always slow to pich up on a new site compared to other engines?
My MSN is at a legitimate 1000 links while my google is still at 6
Comment by Damian Spaulding | October 12, 2005