Popular Newly Launched Websites–good or bad?

Nathan Weinberg, from Inside Google, comments on an interesting article today regarding whether newly launched sites which are experiencing numerous visits, are suspect in the eyes of the search engines. It would seem that a new site which is experiencing many hits would be positive but according to Darren Rowse, that might not be the case.
In his expose, he cited this double-edged sword:

The great success that our marketing effort, from the perspective of the objective mathematical formulas that run the Google search engine, probably looked a whole lot like search engine spam

Darren continues by saying you should grow your site slowly to avoid search engines thinking your numerous links are somehow spam related. Nathan disagrees and says that:

If your site is getting so many links that Google is watching you closely, then you are already doing just fine. Ride the wave of popularity, and in a few months, Google and all the other engines will catch on.

We agree with Nathan–if it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it. If your site is spam-free and experiencing popularity, continue to do what you are doing and you should be in the clear.

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