While true, I don't think that is the sole reason. It is widely known that an old site can add a topic and rank well for the topic in a few short weeks.

I believe link age is a part of the sandbox phenomenon, but that a trust factor is equally important. I suggest that in G's attempt to protect itself from spam, a trust factor of 0 to 1 has been put in the mix.

Every doucment has doc score relative to a keyword or keyphrase within that document's topic. Search results simply pull docs for indexed keywords and present them in descending order.

I think the new formula is: doc_score = doc_score * trust_factor. So if the original score is 9000 but the trust factor is .4, the new score is 3600 which means this site might now appear at #700.

/*tom*/