Can a new domain compete with old non optimized domains?

[belgianguy]

I have a brand new domain with 20 pages of high quality unique content that are optimized for their respective keywords.
The competition (sites in the top ten) are almost 90% non optimized pages, but they have tons of indexed pages, backlinks and are 7 to 15 years old. The backlinks to the competing pages are no more than 3000, in many cases a lot less. Sometimes even less than 50 backlinks.
Some of the competing pages are amazon pages and youtube videos, but never with a lot of backlinks.

Is it hard for my brand new site to compete with these old authority sites?

[Happyeagle]

IMO, I think it will initially, but if you get some solid backlinks (good blog comments and guest posts from relevant authority sites) you could outrank them very fast. I have a website that outranks some very old domain and exact match domains, but it has solid backlinks. I think it comes down to the kinds of backlinks you can get.

[belgianguy]

That is what i thought too, but i have never gone up against these huge authority sites before.

Thanks for the insights!

[yukon]

If you see youtube videos ranking on page #1 in the SERPs for your keyword, I kinda doubt the competition ranking below the Youtube video (and the video itself) are much to worry about.

Just curious, how many views does the youtube video have, If it has something like 1 million views you might want to dig a little deeper with the competition research.

[esdavis]

A lot of authority sites without optimization are ranking not because they are providing the best content for the searcher's intent, but because Google can't find anything better to show that they like.

So solidly optimized pages with very relevant content have a good chance. Check out the on-page content on some of the authority pages ranking. That'll give you a clue if the actual content or just the general site "punch" is causing the ranking.