Age before...

[virtualtraveller]

Someone here mentioned 'Age of site', and I think this is one of the most overlooked important criteria for ranking. I have noticed myself how difficult it is to compete with sites that have been there long before you. No matter how neglected and crap some sites are, with far less ibls than you and no clue about factors such as anchor text etc, they still rank higher than you and refuse to budge in the SERPS. Why? Because they have been there since day dot and google respects this. Of course the high ranking sites get the most link exchange enquiries or natural one-way links from others who are searching for recommended sites.

We all know about the sandbox effect by now and I'm finding that even once you have been let out Google will continue to hobble you in the SERPS for the really competitve words until you have paid your dues. It's frustrating to see insignificant pages on your site going straight to the top but the ones you've worked the hardest on and have loaded with more ibls than any of the other sites on page 1, still refuse to creep up beyond page 5!

This of course is google's way of keeping out spammed SEO sites and ensuring that the SERPs on page 1 aren't dominated by a rash of new highly SEO'd sites. I guess they figure that the longer a site has been around the more likely it is to have plenty of content.

So, unless you have an existing site, you're going to have to be patient.

[cbp]

Older sites have been around for longer --> greater time to obtain more 'natural' links.

CBP

[mantawebsolutions]

i agree, older sites show stability, but i don't think it has to do with the site itself.

Keep in mind that sites change, new look new features, etc...

I think it has more to do with keeping the domain name for several years, keywords seldomly change, plus the fact that the name of the business stays the same, giving it a long lasting feel plus a constant increase in return links over time.

[sandis.viksna]

it's bs, it is question, have you have optimized your pages? : ) we have pages driving visitors withing as fast as 1 week! and no problems! and start for lower keywords, like

'mama bama trama lalala ec lawyer' instead of pure 'lawyer' : )

grow links from the bottom, and then PageRank will come and then also main keywords will start to take their positions.

[spidercos]

sites that have been on the internet longer DO place better, especially in google where there algorithm is based more on historical promenience than many people give credit.

[chiron]

SpiderCOS is correct from my experience. And as for IBLs and all that jazz, tying here to a recent post on sandboxes and how they can help keep spammers down, that's fine and all, but the SEs don't seem too keen on encouraging creaky old sites to add new pages, which seems at odds with giving old domains brownie points for being... old?

Case in point: domain X has been active and growing and adding and refreshing content for a decade, 30 staffers that deliver content only via the web, mostly free interns and NFP in all but name. Thousands of pages that if you update them, get reindexed in a few days and there you go. But don't add a new page, because then you get to enjoy the sandbox with PR 0 and not-in-top-1000 for esoteric keywords for 120 days. What a load of rubbish.

If the search engines want to have their IBLs and PRs and penalty boxes all at the same time, they ought to have some sort of faster-inclusion flag for new pages added to older, established domains that are already well-regarded and ranked, and have 10k relevant one-way IBLs on the books. Just my opinion, I would prefer not to see age be such a strong influence on rankings in the first place. What about, like, making content count for something, and swiftly? Isn't that what we read in white-hat SEO articles all the time? Content is king all right, but only if you want to read all about it a year from now. No wonder the masses love their throwaway blogs these days.

[greeneagle]

Older Sites also trend toward more information depth.
But then again, many are redesigned several times in the process.

How long does GOOG keep records? Are you telling me they query all the Registrars to determine how long Sites have been around?, or that they log and maintain every change?

Even if they could, the info would hold relative little value if any.

I don't think so!
Ken

[Lonna]

I agree that older sites do have a longer history of getting ranked, spidered, indexed, etc. My site has been up for about 8 years, and I think that alone has helped it get listed in various places.

Yet I do think that a good new site could also get well listed, especially if the webmaster is good at promoting it. Content does count, not just age.

[smo]

I had one 4 year old site but never bothered to maintain it till last Aug 04. Then I found the importance of adding content to it as G was returning visitors within a week of adding content. Then I started adding different pages to my site ( on my programming experience ) and now around 100 of new pages ( from Sep 04 till now ) giving me 1500 unique / day from G.

I have good quality content as I write my own experiences on different tested scripts which I developed for different clients over the years..

But I don't think I could have achieved this with the same content in a new site.