Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?

[ukss1984]

We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites.

However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links.

Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

[LukeyJamo]

From our experience, indexation is actually occurring more quickly!

What method are you using to tell Google you have a new site?

Our web design partners will tweet out a new site when it goes live. I think the latest test it only took about 15 minutes for it to appear in Google's index! The authority of the Twitter account is medium (3-4 tweets/day, 500 followers).

We will always submit a Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools as well.

[ukss1984]

Thanks, actually I think I misphrased the question. I don't mean the process of Google having it in the index, I was meaning how long it is taking for it to start to rank for long-tail keywords.

What has your experience been with this?

[LukeyJamo]

That's quite a tough question to answer as it depends on a huge variety of factors.

Some of the new websites sit on aged domains and are more powerful than brand new domains subsequently they rank quicker.

Some of the new websites are blogs and are updated with fresh content rather than static 'brochure' websites (which struggle to rank for anything).