Hacker News Reader

It's even worse on brand new website, google will index your homepage and ignore everything else unless it has some external links. Even with a good sitemap and good usability score.

View on HN

This is a well known phenomenon of "Google Jail" where to combat spammers just setting up hordes of new sites, getting dinged and then migrating to a new domain, Google penalizes new sites until they've been "aged" for some number of months.

Dunno if it's about age so much as it is context. Like my search engine does something similar. The actual text on the pages are only a fraction of the signals used by search engines to put a website to put the putative search result into context.

It's really hard to rank a website if there are no links or traffic to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com