Is Organic SEO Getting Much Harder These Days?

We create websites regularly, but in the past year, none of them seem to rank on Google.

Pages are getting indexed, but even very specific searches like “[long sentence that is only on our page]” don’t show our site. We can only find it using site:our_domain.com.

Has anyone else seen this? Before, Google would start ranking new sites with some backlinks after about 30 days, but now it’s very hard to make progress.

Yes, they aren’t trusting new sites as much unless you have the right authority, and even then, in competitive areas, it’s still hard to get started.

SophyGenesis said:
Yes, they aren’t trusting new sites as much unless you have the right authority, and even then, in competitive areas, it’s still hard to get started.

Twelve months isn’t enough time to see if a site should rank higher. This is really frustrating, I don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

SophyGenesis said:
Yes, they aren’t trusting new sites as much unless you have the right authority, and even then, in competitive areas, it’s still hard to get started.

What makes the right kind of authority?

@SHANE
A Domain Authority of 50 or higher.

Betsy said:
@SHANE
A Domain Authority of 50 or higher.

And do you achieve that with content and backlinks?

Authority is key, embrace it and succeed.

EllaShaw said:
Authority is key, embrace it and succeed.

100% agree. Safe travels on your SEO journey.

It doesn’t matter if you publish great original content that answers the search query—it won’t rank unless it’s user-generated content or you have a very authoritative website. The quality and helpfulness of your content doesn’t count. This won’t change unless Google updates the algorithm again.

Try launching a forum instead; my forums rank for many queries even with very short content.

@CommentConnoisseur
Great suggestion, thanks!

@CommentConnoisseur
Nice idea, thanks! Can you share the forum software you use or do you think any would work?

oliviamartin said:
@CommentConnoisseur
Nice idea, thanks! Can you share the forum software you use or do you think any would work?

Discourse and XenForo seem to be the most popular.

oliviamartin said:
@CommentConnoisseur
Nice idea, thanks! Can you share the forum software you use or do you think any would work?

You can filter by Discussions & Forums in Ahrefs or Semrush. Parasite SEO is a good tool too.

@Benaiah
Ahrefs and Semrush are great! They help you find which forums are doing well. I’ve tried UsePulse too for mentions in forums; it’s useful for forum-like chats.

@CommentConnoisseur
I’ve seen old forums from 5-10 years ago ranking, and it’s surprising. It seems like they stay that way forever, right?

@CommentConnoisseur
Isn’t launching a forum much harder? It’s not as easy as setting up a blog.

Yeah, seeing the same thing.

Some websites are two years old and get thousands of visitors from Bing, Yahoo, DDG, Ecosia, and some from YouTube, Pinterest, and other social traffic. But I get almost no traffic from Google, and it doesn’t seem like that will change soon.

It’s like Google decided not to bother indexing or ranking many websites anymore. When you look at the search results with AI answers, sponsored results, YouTube videos, and other clutter before any organic results, getting meaningful traffic is very difficult.

I’ve heard many stories like this. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason, but Google’s been changing its results a lot over the past year. They might be focusing more on domain authority to keep results reliable.

We’re seeing the same trend with our sites and some clients’.

It might get worse as Google focuses more on AI responses over traditional search results.

They’re rolling it out slowly because it’s a big change that needs to be careful—otherwise, they would have done it all at once when ChatGPT was announced.

I run several local service websites. This trend is happening in my area too.

Welcome to the new era of SEO.