New URLs fly to the top

Marketing
1

I have noticed that although most of the pages on my site are indexed, most do not rank very highly or come up anywhere near the top of Google when searching. However I have also noticed that new pages I add to the site (the latest 20 of which are linked to from the home-page), are indexed straight away and fly to the top of Google. After some time (usually a few weeks, sometimes as quickly as a few days) it seems they drop from the top.

Therefore to make sure that some pages are always indexed highly I could in theory simply keep changing their URLs and include a link to them on the homepage. In tests this seems to work very well and the pages are again at the top of Google search results. Can anyone tell me why this happens, why new pages (or pages with new URLs that appear to Google to be new pages) immediately top the search results? Also is there any reason why changing the URLs on a regular basis to keep these pages at the top is a bad idea (apart from the obvious broken links, although I could create 301 redirects)?

2

Hi, and welcome to SitePoint!

What you are seeing is a result of recent change in ranking algorithms Google implemented last year known as “QDF” or Query Deserves Freshness.

Newer web content is artificially promoted higher from an established domain as Google feels that for some topics relevancy is somewhat connected to timeliness.

The golden rule for URLs is that “Good URLs never change!”. Sure you could rewrite, redirect them - but then you get into chained redirects which are additional steps that slows down the whole process of link/fetch/display.

3

Gaming the system to your advantage and to the detriment of everyone but you seems like a bad thing to me, but that depends on your ethics and how much you fear Google’s quality team catching on.