Why does Google make it harder for new websites?
This is actually fairly obvious when you think about what Google's goals are.
Google wants to provide the best experience possible for the people who search within its system. That means providing websites that have proven both to help users, and to remain consistent over time.
How do they prove that? Mainly by monitoring the user experience signals of people using your website over a long period of time, so that they can trust you will continue to do so - the best indicator of the future is the past.
What an aged website has over a new domain
The features that Google likes about old domains in comparison to new domains are:
- A history of serving users: they have shown over time that they are providing the user with something that is at least slightly relevant to the topic.
- Consistency: Google crawls websites regularly, and so it understands that an older website has been the same for many years, and therefore trusts that the publisher will not drastically change it any time soon.
What can you do to combat this problem?
There are plenty of things that you can do to try and get a new website ranking more quickly.
You could buy a related expired domain from a website auction site that's still indexed within Google instead of using a fresh domain. This means that you retain the website age, and therefore avoid the 1 year sandbox. You must first check to make sure it hasn't been previously spammed or penalised - and you would have to retain the brand and use the same brand name to maintain the appearance of it being the same website.
Or alternatively you can accept that SEO for a new website will be a long process with the majority of the wins delayed, and therefore make financial decisions with the understanding that it will take a while for this project to provide an ROI.