Is it just me or am I overlooking something?

Why does it always seem to take 3 months or more before you start seeing decent page rankings when you launch a new website? I don't believe in the "Sandbox" theory but I have noticed new sites we build will rank quickly then drop off only to slowly climb back up to the top again.

As an example, Our site is just a little over a month old- we have good rankings for most of our search terms, but our site has not yet been officially charted in Alexa.com - nor do we have any "qualified" backlinks showing.

Any insight on this?

Rankings like alexa can take a while to update. Don't worry about these ranking systems as they are not very useful.

As for reported backlinks, Google only shows a sample of your backlinks. If you just have low quality links, Google may not display any of them. Google counts more links than what they report with the link: command. So don't worry too much about which links show up under this command.

Thanks for this information! I know we have over 200 backlinks right now but not a lot of them have high PR.

I'm just wondering why every site we build follows this pattern:

1) Website ranks really high.
2) Website 1 month later drops by 10-20 ranks.
3) Website 3 months later goes back to it's high front page ranking.

I just recently started to really pay attention to this - in the past I used to just check rankings after 2-3 months.

For a new site, it's quite common to see a short period of good rankings followed by a disappearance - and then a gradual climb back. I think it seems more like a boost for new content, followed by re-evaluation!

Do not lost your sleep for alexa. As they wont play any direct significant role unless and until you want to sold your website. This is the algo of google which keep changing every time and hence giving nightmare to people who is doing some unrequired thing on their websites.

If you want to see your backlinks than sign up for google webmaster and you will see the changes.

ranking in alexa can get very high only if ur visitors are having alexa toolbar on their browser and about google rankings, just try getting good backlinks from related and authority websites

google pr and backlinks are updated in around every 3 months period (not fixed time) so just wait and watch for the updates for ur websites

Originally Posted by DoctorTree

google pr and backlinks are updated in around every 3 months period (not fixed time) so just wait and watch for the updates for ur websites

Ah Ha!! I have always wondered why Google seems to take about 3 months to give PR. That explains why our dynamic sites start off good, drop after a few weeks, and then go back to high ranks.
I never used to really pay much attention to it until we re-did our site and I watched our rankings on a daily basis.

When watching grass, you never see it grow, right?

New sites are susceptible to google ranking fluctuation. Just keep on building quality links for your site to achieve a more stable ranking. As regard to Alexa ranking, don't get too concerned about it. The traffic info it gives are misleading and inaccurate.

Originally Posted by Modern_Media

Is it just me or am I overlooking something?

Why does it always seem to take 3 months or more before you start seeing decent page rankings when you launch a new website? I don't believe in the "Sandbox" theory but I have noticed new sites we build will rank quickly then drop off only to slowly climb back up to the top again.

As an example, Our site is just a little over a month old- we have good rankings for most of our search terms, but our site has not yet been officially charted in Alexa.com - nor do we have any "qualified" backlinks showing.

Any insight on this?

This happens to almost all sites. The more your high ranking keywords are, the more your site is spidered because the crawlers always have to come back to gain more information.

This is also the downside because if it sees no new ones or have not seen lots of visitors it expected, the keyword rank will fall.

Having lots of quality backlinks like articles can be a stable foundation in the long run.

It all depends on the updates in the website, Robot find new pages in starting but after few month their is no update or changes in website's pages then bot hardly visit pages and it drop its ranking in result pages.