A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic “it depends.”
The answer depends on what that four year old site has been doing over the years versus what you have been doing over the years with your one year old site. If the older site has done nothing much, and the new site has been doing good things to build up the site’s user based and such, then it can do better.
The question posted was:
Can a 1-year-old site realistically beat a 4-year-old competitor in SEO, and what actually helps close that gap fastest?
If a competitor has been around for 4 years and we started just 1 year ago, is it still realistic to beat them in SEO? What strategies actually help close the gap faster when competitors have more age, authority, and links?
John Mueller’s answer:
A website growing older is inevitable; growing worthwhile is earned.
What happened in those 4 years? What happened in the 1 year? Some older websites have done amazing things over the years, and you can’t just jump in with a site that has 2 links more and is 3 points closer to 100, and expect to be considered more relevant (whether by search engines or people). Other sites may have squandered their time in the domain registry and survived by being the proverbial one-eyed man of the web. (I think I’m trying to say “it depends”?)
If your site has been around for a year now, and don’t have a clear understanding of the differences in value (not SEO metrics) between these sites, I’d recommend taking a step back and first trying to get an objective bigger picture view, and then – in most cases – thinking more strategically (users, marketing, functionality, business, promotion, users) rather than purely SEO-centric. Likely your site is built on a modern setup, and you sound SEO-focused, so technically there’s probably not a lot to break or fix.
Forum discussion at Reddit.
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