How long does it take for Google to index a new site and has anyone experienced serious fluctuations in SERP within 2 weeks after launch?

[deluxebydesign]

Hi guys,

I have recently launched my ecommerce jewellery site - www.luxuryfinejewellery.com - and noticed some serious swings in SERP over the last couple of weeks.

From ranking No 2, 3 and 4 for the keyword 'luxury fine jewellery' on Google.com, the homepage periodically disappears from the Top 50 altogether.

I thought it was the Sandbox, as I recently purchased the domain name, within the last 6 weeks, however the fact that it does rank on the 1st page some of the time is a mystery.

Has anyone also experienced this? Could you provide some advice on what to expect until the the rankings settle.

Thanks in advance,

Satbir

[Nightwing]

I've had similar experiences and after a while you wonder if doing an ancient African rain dance appealing to the furture Google gods would have just about as much an effect as following the mystical path of SEO best practice

[AdamThompson]

In my experience, sometimes sites jump around a lot in the rankings when they are new. I don't know exactly why they do this, but I just keep working hard on quality backlinks and things always settle down.

[GIGS20]

Google webmaster tools can be your first stop for your sitemap. Most of indexing is done between 2 days to 3-4 weeks.  Depends on the quality of your website and work that was done for on-site and off-site SEO.  What you can do for faster indexing?  Submit manually your website to all search engines and do social bookmarking for your website. Site structure and popularity of your website are the main factors. Also, if the your domain name has some good history to it then index process can actually take just a few hours.

[AdamThompson]

I disagree with some of your advice. "Submit manually your website to all search engines" is unnecessary. "do social bookmarking" to build a bunch of backlinks could actually hurt your site, as most do-follow social bookmarking sites are low quality spammy sites.

[GIGS20]

Of course, many social bookmarking sites are low quality site, but I had in mind the major ones like Digg, Tanza, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Folked.  I personally think that manual submission of all primary URL links to Yahoo, Google, and Bing is actually very helpful for faster indexing.

[jenmcardle]

There are numerous theories about the "Google dance" which occurs when a site first gets indexed. It is very common for new sites to see their results wildly bounce for the first month. The prevailing theory, which makes a lot of sense, is a significant portion of Google's ranking algorithm is dependent upon Google's own data. When you click on a search result, Google obtains a lot of data. Some examples: how long you spend on the result page, do you bounce back to Google and search for the same query again, etc.

In an effort to gain more data from new sites, Google artificially boosts the ranking of new sites. The result is their results appear higher then they would otherwise be found. More users click on those results giving Google the data they require to properly rank your website.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I have to agree with GIGS20 on the manual submission (obviously only to engines you care about).  Why? because in my own tests, I have consistently been able to get new sites ranked faster via sitemap direct submission than waiting for crawlers.

As far as the whole fluctuation thing - think about it this way - there are multiple algorithms in the Google system, it's not just one algorithm.  And every site that gets an evaluation for it's on-site merits alone, then needs to have that evaluation held up in relation to other signals (off-site links and mentions, off-site social signals, etc.) and then all of that has to then be weighed against every other site that their system determines might be a topical focus match.

When a site is new, there's not a lot to go on so every time Google churns another update, every time they run another algorithm, things will likely change for some sites.

Then if you throw in the fact that many other sites are also being changed, worked on, further optimized (or hurt) every day in that topical focus, and the end result is an even more unstable ranking situation for new sites, especially when those are in highly competitive markets.

[deluxebydesign]

Thanks a  lot for your input everyone, I will submit manually and continue to get quality backlinks.