🙃 Two Common (But Incorrect) SEO Theories. Again, the two theories below are NOT accurate and do NOT apply in real life. These are just misconceptions we have to address along the way to the truth.

SEOs have long observed that page rank can behave weirdly for new pages, and so two (incorrect) theories have been proposed for explaining new-page rankings:

The Sandbox Theory 🏝 Google deliberately hamstrings newer pages (no matter their merit) until they’ve gotten older and have more data logged in the books.

The Honeymoon Theory 🌛 Google deliberately boosts newer pages (no matter their merit) to see how the page responds to traffic and/or how the traffic responds to the page.

For the third and final time, the above theories are NOT actually how things work. Yes, it is observably true that new-page rankings behave differently—but the real explanation from SEJ and John Mueller is that Google has to make some assumptions about a page’s content until page traffic can provide signals. In other words: until Google can find out for sure how readers react to your page content, Google will take its best guess using what it knows about your other pages.

Broadly speaking, Google will give a boost to new pages whose domains tend to put out good pages, and it’ll give a headwind to new pages whose domains aren’t particularly trustworthy.

Get more from theCLIKK