Let’s go back to the “challenging” sort of topics. Three days ago I made a comment to Dee Barizo’s post about building site authority in Google, so there is a great opportunity to write a comprehensive post about one of the most interesting public-known SEO issues - Fresh Site Bonus.

What the hell is the Fresh Site Bonus?

In short - many people notice that algorithm of Google evinces a strange tendency to give a strong boost to brand new websites. Clearly - new sites are just showed higher on search engine results pages. It looks pretty simple, so why have I said Fresh Site Bonus is an unnailed barnburner?

No one knows the FSB

The worst thing in FSB is fact that we cannot calculate it. We can estimate Google PageRank, we can do a few fixes to have more page indexed, also we are able to appraise our competitors in SEO for respective keyterms… But we cannnot find out how FSB works, in fact. Every instance brings different answers.

So there might be no FSB, right?

Some people interested in search engine optimization claim Fresh Site Bonus is not a module of engine, and there might be no FSB, in fact. My native, author of one of the most interesting Polish blogs about SEO has made a nice point to this topic. I’m not going to translate all content of his writings, it will be much better to do a smart excerpt and add a comment. He wrote about one theory that says there is no FSB, there’s only a “blank sheet” for each website. He explains it as a result of the way that Google sets sites on the SERPs. Theory has been proven by batch of SEO experiences we already know, and finally author writes that Fresh Site Bonus phenomenon might be related to the first bigger outcome of incoming links to a website. It looks like a precisely made explanation, in my humble opinion. He also adds there is a lack of information about FSB that might be older than 2001, so acting of FSB probably is a result of amplifying frequency of increasing number of incoming links to batch of all things that Google algorithm uses to rank respective pages on SERPs.

How to play with Mr FSB

Well, if there is a chance to hit better positions, why not to use it. It’s obvious fact that SEOs pull out all stops for fight with our competitors on SERPs, so let’s say there is an opportunity to play with Mr FSB. I can say I have counted two Polish websites that succeed their business by taking great boost thanks to FSB. First one is a great example of power of smart using of spam, I have already described that site on Net Business Blog, so I quote my comment:

Here you have an example. Let’s say there is a smart ass that do SEO. Major goal is clear - to make nice money, so what does he do. He develops a script that collects search results from Microsoft’s live.com, and makes them public on his own website. Next, he places invasive CPC ads, after that he uses a few hypertext links from strong sites with high “authority” in Google. And the question is - how does he do? And the answer is: the chances are that he does pretty. And one other question, much more interesting - how he does pretty? And the second answer is - all traffic driven to his automatically generated pages is a a result of unique content and existence of a plaything that SEOs get used to call Fresh Site Bonus. Google drives daily traffic larger than 30k of unique visits every day, so our smart guy earns on his crap something about $100, daily. When the FSB goes away, all traffic driven by Google disappears. Just take a look at these stats.

Pretty smart practice, doesn’t it? Everything counts on large amounts on unique keyterms. Also I have one another example. Spammer does a better job, his website looks like a real service with registration for users, there are some public stats, and other pretty playthings that provide a better look like for spam sites. Also, he has got an older domain name, Anyway, here you can take a look at its Alexa stats, I had been very impressed when I found it. Feel sorry, but I’m gonna play White Hat SEO and I won’t share a wider description. Folks that know how to get these things done already milk the cow, all buddies that are interested only in getting some how-to tutorial won’t ever milk the spam cow, by no means