One of the frustrating things about being a new site is that new sites rank poorly in Google. This is doubly frustrating for ecommerce sites who often rely on Google organic traffic for a lot of their sales.

In the SEO community, it’s widely accepted that new domains are penalized in search engines (e.g. receive poor rankings) for approximately 6 – 8 months. There’s little that can be done about this. In fact, sometimes doing aggressive SEO work in that period can make it longer. This  is called the aging delay.

If you want to minimise this damage, the best steps are:

• Register the domain as soon as you can
• Put up a one page site, with a brief explanation as to what it is/will be. It doesn’t need a pretty design, just something basic, as long as it contains a few good keywords so Google understands what the page/domain is about.
• Get the site one or two links – beg your friend, your brother’s blog, etc. The links are so Google can discover the site and start the clock running to age your domain.

Given most sites take a few months to build, it’s a good way to minimize the painful waiting period.