A common story: we promoted a client to the TOP3 in Yandex, and yet some old competitor's website, inconvenient, with an unclean design, "hangs" higher in the search results and rightly irritates our client!
The client asks himself: "I made a new website with a beautiful design, invest in advertising and promotion, already in the TOP in SEO and even have an Instagram account, and THIS one does nothing, the site is a collective farm and yet higher, how is that??"
Yes, in much the same way as the post-Soviet pop scene blocks the entire airtime on TV for the New Year. However, I'm kidding, this has nothing to do with it))
An offensive situation, and most importantly, it leads to a parasitic thought: maybe this is a good tactic to freeze and not change anything if you are already in the TOP. Or even worse, why develop a website if at the very top there are websites that leave much to be desired?
In this regard, I recall the student principle "The first year you panama mobile database work for your record book, and then the record book works for you." Indeed, SEO has its own record book - the age of the site, brand traffic, links from authoritative resources and other factors of the authority of the web resource. It is easier for a search engine to trust an older site that has accumulated a lot of positive statistics in the past. How is it that despite obvious problems with mobile adaptability, design, and usability of the site, such sites remain at the top of the search results?
Search engines evaluate sites using metrics – calculated values by which sites are compared. If a search engine evaluates the usability of a site, it will translate this evaluation into a number for each site and will compare the numbers.
So, the first reason why an old but “collective farm” site is in the TOP is averaging metrics. To ensure stability of the search results, the search engine averages the metric over a period of time. For example, let's take the speed of a site: today the site works quickly, but on the weekend, let's say, the flow of visitors increases, the server sags, and the site works more slowly. This does not mean that the site's positions will fall by the weekend, but will be higher on weekdays. To avoid "storms" in the search results, Yandex and Google average the site speed indicator, for example, over the last 3 months. So, the site could have accumulated problems, but the average values of its metrics may still be within the normal range.
2nd reason. Search engines save resources, and for pages that have already been indexed, on which there are no significant changes, they do not recalculate metrics sometimes for years. Server resources are the expense part of the PS business, and it is not surprising that they optimize their expenses in every possible way. It follows that the search engine can use old data in ranking.
From an understanding of the principles of Yandex and Google, it follows that yes, "the record book works for the student", but at the same time, sooner or later, the metrics of the old site are updated, and the efforts of the young developing site will accumulate their level of trust. This can happen smoothly over time, or suddenly with a major update to the search engine algorithms or manual verification of the site by PS employees - assessors.