Search Engine Index Speed and possible Human factor

[Delicious Webdesign]

This may be of casual interest to SEO junkies.

Have been monitoring Google for a while to see when a new shiny website will be indexed and ranked for its main search phrases as its been about 2-3 months since we launched it.

Google are taking a very very long time to give one of the main key search terms a realistic ranking (that it deserves due to huge content and optimisation) but have noticed that Bing still hasnt found it (even though its linked from some PR3 pages and i actually submitted the URL to Bing 1 month ago, never done that before !)

SERP results for some international super competitive search terms

Bing - site is not indexed yet!
Yahoo - 1st, 2nd and 4th
Google - 12th, 64th and 600 ish

The third of the three terms is the most competitive, This leads me to believe something that I havent seen before that certain 'high value / key search terms' have an age factor assigned to them or a human factor involved that takes time to assign and then filter back to the results.

[fisicx]

Age has always been a major factor. It's just that in a niche the age can be outweighed by content relevance.

100 5 year old domains will usually win oin age alone against a newbie with similar content.

But a new site with good content will often win against a small number of 5 year old sites whose content is weak and poorly optimised.

The solution for your site is to focus away from the competitve terms and go for something a little more long tail. You will probably find enough results to make the site viable, build on these and edge over time to the more competitive end if the market.

[Andy Walpole]

Bing - site is not indexed yet!
Yahoo - 1st, 2nd and 4th
Google - 12th, 64th and 600 ish
.

As long as I remember Yahoo was always quicker than Google in giving SERPS to new sites. However, it always used to be about equal with MSN / Live. Now Bing seems to take ages to properly index a site and often only indexes a fraction of the total pages. It seems really tuned in to only quality links from authority sites, at least far more than Yahoo and Google are.

[sean.browne]

I have registered about 5 domains / created about 5 sites since Christmas each one took about 5 days for Google to index. I haven't checked the other engines.

[awebapart.com]

Google are taking a very very long time to give one of the main key search terms a realistic ranking...

The third of the three terms is the most competitive, This leads me to believe something that I havent seen before that certain 'high value / key search terms' have an age factor assigned to them or a human factor involved that takes time to assign and then filter back to the results.
If you are having trouble getting a relatively new site ranking well for a competitive term on google, then that could be google's sandboxing (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=90505&page=2#post713380) kicking in.

[Delicious Webdesign]

Age has always been a major factor. It's just that in a niche the age can be outweighed by content relevance.

Yes agree that age plays an important factor but this is the first time I have seen it potentially applied to one search term on a site but not another (both competitive).

[awebapart.com]

this is the first time I have seen it potentially applied to one search term on a site but not another (both competitive).
Perhaps it depends on what and how google deems a term to be competitive (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=90505&page=2#post713380) in relation to sandboxing. Perhaps one of those terms crosses the google's 'competitive' threshold and the other doesn't.

Also is one of those terms a primary website term (what the home page is targeting) and one a secondary term (what other pages are targeting)? This might be an influencing factor too.