Whenever you register a new domain you have one major handicap: it’s untested, unfamiliar, and yes it’s new. Search engines HATE new domains or at the very least are very wary of them and thusly don’t make a habit of going out of their way to reward a new website with great SERPs positioning overnight.

How to Rank a New Domain

If you build too many links to a new site too quickly you’ll wind up in the sandbox (see what is the Google Sandbox effect). If you don’t build any or enough links you’ll never rank for your keywords.

Aside from buying an aged domain there’s no way around it; all sites start out as a new domain at some point. The question then becomes are we doomed to sit idly by and spend our site’s salad days at the bottom of the SERPs? This would be a defeatist (not to mention a shorter) post if that were the case, so let’s talk about how to rank a new domain.

First, we have the old fashioned way of slow and natural link building. You create good content and encourage other webmasters to link to it from their sites, therefore earning you quality links based on the quality of your content.

This is a slow process as you’ve got a lot to prove when you’re just starting out. Refer to my post on how to increase website traffic for more information on where you can get an infinite supply of links from some of the greatest traffic sources known to webmasters.

Secondly, if you’re in a hurry (and why wouldn’t you be?) then you can work on building links using different link structures (see what is the best link structure for more info). Generally, unless we’re talking high quality links, we don’t want to be created too many links to our money site or in other words the page on our website we’re building links to.

What we CAN do is to create a second level of links; URLs which point to our money site which we can then in turn link to. This builds that second layer’s link juice up which it then passes on to our money site. Ultimately this SAFELY helps us rank our money site by passing additional juice on to it without sullying its name by “blasting” links to it.

These second layer links can be a number of web pages which you can create such as blogs on services like Blogger, articles on Ezine Articles or other directories, RSS feeds, social bookmarking sites, or even websites which you create.

.INFO Sites

Creating your own websites is the best method to take as it’s unique as compared to a site like Ezine which everyone is getting links from. You can register and create several .INFO websites on the cheap and blast them with links while setting them to redirect to your money site, thus safely passing all of that link juice to your brand new money site. It’s a good way to avoid the sandbox if your site is new and can help you rank surprisingly quickly.