This actually isn’t a brand new development. If it is actually happening, it’s been going on now for at least 2 months.
What surprises me is that, from reading different SE forums, there seems to be confirmation that Google is not indexing new sites; however, it’s not a hot topic.
Considering the importance of Google to a site’s success, this leaves me completely bewildered.
My experience comes through a client who bought a domain in July, then put up a site shortly thereafter.
Until I came on board I don’t think he had any incoming links outside of ones from a Google Ads campaign he had. I put a link to him on my site. The link was duly indexed by Google. And yet, the site was still not in their database.
Currently Google seems to be cataloging links to new sites, but not following them. There is talk that Google is trying to do some mass cleanup in their database to get rid of some of the spamming and ‘bad’ sites.
The idea being that they don’t want to take on more data until they can handle the current index. Makes sense.
But this is probably affecting the quality of results. But, most searchers probably won’t notice. So, if this is happening, it’s no big deal for them.
Still, this new development is disturbing for anyone trying to get up and running on the Net. It underlines the need for other SEs to get competitive and somehow challenge Google’s dominance.
When so many rely on one source for most of their income, it can only take one algorithm change to not only affect the bottom line, but erase it.
As an aside, I’ve been using Yahoo as my main SE for personal use. The results just seem to be better, more on target. This condition might be a side-effect of Goole’s success.
Their dominance attracts the attentions of spammers everywhere. It’s where most people go, so that’s where they want to be, too. This in turn brings less relevant results as spammer sites are ranking for keywords that have nothing to do with the site’s content.
In fact, you can easily find sites that have no real content at all, just AdSense ads, in the top 10 of most of Google’s results today. My keywords, which target marketing and SEM, have car rental and law office sites in the top 20.
I don’t think the keywords even appear on those sites. But there they are.
There’s not much you can do, except hope Google does do something to stop this or that they start losing eyeballs to Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
If you’d like to do your part, start using one of those last three listed. You might be surprised how little you miss Google.