Does the Age of Site Matter in SEO?
Many have asked if the age of their web sites matter in their rankings in the SERPs. Needless to be said — yes, it does matter. As of this reading, why don’t you search for a highly-competitive keyword and look at the results. If you might notice, all the results on the first page would be web sites with years on the World Wide Web under their belt. I do have a domain though, which ranked in the first page after only a month, but the niche is highly limited and non-competitive and I believe I was able to do optimize it quite well.
I could see a couple of factors contributing to this aspect though there may be a lot more which I wouldn’t be touching:
1. Google Sandbox
As was discussed before, newer web sites are placed in the sandbox for more competitive terms or key phrases. That would mean, if you don’t stay longer than a year or so and if you’re terribly unlucky or if your niche is highly saturated, chances are you’ll never see you web site out of the sandbox.
2. Age of Back Links
This is arguably the main reason why age of site matters. Basically, search engines take the age of the backlink as a factor in their algorithm. Google, particularly, computers for trust to a certain web site. Which means, old links which aren’t removed are trusted by this number of web sites, hence, a plus for that web site linked to. Consequently, because of this, unscrupulous competitors could play with the algorithm. The term “Google popping” came up when rivals started to play dirty. They’d put up links to their competitors’ web sites and pull them down after the page has been indexed.
