Thanks to a comprehensive study by Ahrefs, we may be able to give a more satisfying answer than ‘It depends’ after all. To get their research off the ground, the Ahrefs team randomly selected 2 million keywords and pulled data on the Top 10 ranking pages for each of them. By doing this, they were able to calculate that the average Top 10 ranking page on Google is over 2 years old on average, while the first-ranked pages are around 3 years old. In fact, it turned out that only 22% of Top 10 were created within 1 year.
To answer the question of how long it takes to tank in Google, Ahrefs took 2 million random pages that were first seen by their crawler a year ago. Next, they tracked the position history of each page for any keyword it’s ranked for. The results? Only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top 10 search results within 1 year for at least 1 keyword!
What also became clear once the Ahrefs team analyzed all data was that pages from websites with a high Domain Rating (DR) hugely outperformed those with a low DR.
When the study zoomed into this 5.7 % of ‘lucky’ pages to see how long it took them to climb from the bottom to the Top 10, it turned out that the majority of them achieved this in approximately 61 to 182 days.
If you want to learn more about the results of the Ahrefs study, don’t miss the infographic below by The Website Group!
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