Can a new page rank well for a competitive keyword in Google?  The question came up about whether new pages could rank for competitive keywords or not in Google or if Google does something that makes it difficult for these newer pages to rank well for more competitive keywords.

John Mueller from Google discussed this, and while he said it can be difficult to rank with new pages due to the many ranking factors, it is certainly possible.  But he mention SEO specifically and how SEO alone likely won’t be the reason for it.

Sure.  Theoretically, that is definitely possible.  It’s not the case where we would say that this keyword is classified in this specific way and therefore, only pages that have achieved this age and this number of links and this number of other factors can show up for those kind of queries.

It’s really the case that we use a lot of different factors to determine crawling, indexing and ranking and sometimes it can happen that a really new page is suddenly really important for us and that we would rank it really high, even for keywords that are fairly competitive.  So that’s theoretically possible.

Then he goes on to say in these types of situations, it isn’t likely that SEO is playing much of a role here if you do want new pages ranking for highly competitive queries.

Now, if the next question is how can I do that, I don’t have a magic answer for you there, that’s something that can be tricky, that can be hard to do, that can be something that you can’t directly kind of influence from the SEO things as well.

So a common use case here that happens every now and then is that something suddenly shows up in the news, so maybe it’s a topic that’s always been kind of talked about, that lots of people searching for that information, but suddenly something happens and information about a specific aspect of that topic is in the news, and everyone is searching for that is really on one page of the internet where it’s really new, and then it’s important for our algorithms to recognize that and say well, this seems to be something that is really critical and really important at the moment and we really need to make sure we can show this in search.

But for the most part, that’s not something you can tweak with HTML on your pages to make that happen.

That said, starting off with great SEO will give those pages a leg up when it comes to ranking new pages on something that happens to be highly topical.  If the page is already suffering from poor SEO or other technical issues that could hinder its performance in the search results, it probably won’t do as well as a similar page – newer or older – that has better SEO.