How long does it take to for a new website to get good rankings at Google, Yahoo and MSN?

Here is a great article by Eric Enge that takes a look at latency in search engine rankings. Back in March, he published a case study on the SEW blog titled How Long Does it Take a New Site to Rank in the Search Engines? The study showed the pace at which a new site about a popular American folk song, Follow the Drinking Gourd, climbed the rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Today, Eric is going to update the results since the initial post, and also make some observations about how each search engine responded to removed pages.

What made the study interesting is that the site quickly established itself as an authority with regard to its subject matter, an enigmatic American folk song first published in 1928, but with origins rumored to go back to the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War. Other sites on the same subject rapidly switched over to linking to the site, and in fact some of the “competing sites” removed their content and then linked to the Follow the Drinking Gourd site.

Because of the way this unfolded, you can get a pretty direct view into the latencies of each search engine in ranking such a site. Of course, in more competitive market spaces, there are many other challenges to getting ranked, but knowing the latency involved is a good thing.

The data showed Yahoo and Live Search moving the new site into top 10 positions after only 19 days. In the original write-up, he saw that after 47 days Google had not yet done so. Now he has some additional data about the progress of the search engines involved. Click here to read the rest of this interesting article.