Delay between being indexed and ranking for new pages.

[isaac663]

I've noticed with the last few pages i've built that there's a delay between them being indexed and them actually ranking.  Anyone else finding that?  And why is it like that?

Not much of an issue as they tend to pop up after a week or so, but I am curious.

Isaac.

[AlanBleiweiss]

This is one of the million questions we face dealing with a less than clear message from Google on what they do.

Generally speaking, just one scenario is that they need to get confirmation signals when new content is discovered. Unfortunately that's not something that always happens, yet it does happen.  The stronger a site is long-term, the less likely that will happen, yet even then it can.

[KristinaKledzik]

This is something I've seen on websites of all sizes. I've worked with a couple of well-respected colleges - the type of site that you would think Google would automatically trust - and it took anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months from new pages being indexed to ranking as high as they can go without more help. We actually charted the rise of one article, written by a professor, with a link off the homepage of one of the college sites, and it took over a month to stop rising in rankings. For reference, this was about a year ago.

So, I think Alan is exactly right: I think that Google wants a lot of confirmation signals that a page is legit, and it takes awhile for its crawler to identify all of them. Google values how long a page has been around, and click through rate, which comes over time.