If you read through some of the webmaster forums, you’ll find this scenario happening over and over again: A new webmaster creates a site that within a week or so gets indexed by Google with strong rankings for many of its top keywords, only to have those same lofty rankings come crashing down into the search neverland just a few weeks or a month later.

My take on this is that if you have a brand-new, never-been-used domain name and you build a website on it, Google will give you a grace or a honeymoon period during which time your new website might achieve high rankings in the search results for its keywords. Google then pokes, prods and see how well you do at these higher positions, and then after the trial, the search engine will give you the boot from the penthouse to the outhouse.

Many new webmasters worry that their site has dropped due to some kind of penalty. In mind, it’s not due to any penalty but rather just how Google handles brand-new websites. Once the grace period is over it’s up to you as a webmaster to fight and earn your way back to the top by using the traditional methods of SEO including link building and creating unique content.

Google is essentially telling you, “You saw the good life, now how hard do you want to work to get back there?”

And be forewarned that the journey back to the top usually takes months if not years rather than days and weeks.

In some cases maybe there was a penalty which sent your new website to the back of the pack, such as duplicate content or unscrupulous SEO techniques but for the most part I think that what most webmasters are seeing is just part of the Google initiation process for new sites.

So if you are starting a website with a domain name you just registered or you are planning to start one up in hopes of dominating the rankings and striking it rich quick, chances are you will have a similar experience. However, if you build a website on an aged domain name, that is one that you may have purchased a while ago but just never developed or one you recently picked up but had been registered years earlier, you may experience better, more permanent results.