Shame on Google’s “Aging Delay”

Lawrence Deon in a post on “Web Marketing Now”, wrote about the length of time it takes Google to calculate and attribute a higher page rank to a much deserving website. Originally, it was to eliminate “link farms” and other unfair SEO behavior, but they’ve gone too far! 

Lawrence argues the controversy is a bit of a miss-understanding and I think Google’s gone too far.  First, an excerpt from Lawrence’s post:

Current and unconfirmed speculation has been misplacing the blame [for delayed or penalized listing] on Google’s “sandbox” effect. While this is a possibility I believe it’s also highly improbable.

The sandbox holding period is typically anywhere between 90 to 120 days, the “aging delay” appears to be much longer. I’ve seen new sites delayed for up to 6-8 months.

The premise of the sandbox delay theory suggests that new sites are being penalized for gaining too many links too fast. To date I haven’t seen a scrap of evidence to support that claim.

It just doesn’t seem ‘reasonable’ for Google to penalize sites for acquiring legitimate directory listings and building an optimized reciprocal link network. In my opinion, mainstream SEOs are confusing the existing sandbox effect, with Google’s new ‘aging filter’ that arrived on the search scene earlier this year.

It seems more likely that Google’s aging filter is weighing the ‘maturity’ of inbound links and not the new site itself. Meaning that in addition to the traditional ranking criterion, the age of a site’s inbound links are also now considered and given a stronger rank.

-Lawrence Deon

If you ask me, the “Aging Delay” makes logical sense on a whiteboard on some corporate retreat, but like most things discussed during those retreats, it only makes sense at the time.

By waiting to give a better page rank to new content, pictures, or interlocking links, they may have slowed the “free ride” the spammers were advertising a year ago, but they’ve also unduly punished everyday sites for being new and ever-changing.

For shame!