Links and Age as Search Engine Ranking Factors - Age of Site
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The age of a website is a very important factor for both search engine rankings and links.
Old domains costs a lot more than new ones, starting at around $100 and going up to $10,000 and more. Google and other search engine are well aware of this, hence they make an assumption that anyone who can invest several hundred bucks or several thousand bucks in a domain is not going to use that domain for spam.
Spammers buy domains in bulk because they need volume. It's too expensive to buy old domains, hence Google loves grandfathered web addresses. I also suspect that Google would try to learn the price paid for domain and then include it in the trust computation. This is only a guess, but it makes sense to do it. No spammer is going to pay $500,000 or more for a web address.
It's easier to rank for any term if a website is aged. Older sites may also get away with more than new ones.
Inbound links play a major role in the age factor. Old domains tend to have many aged links, which is good for Google algorithms.
New websites need to earn their trust, kind of like new friends and employees. They can't just say it, they need to show it with links and content. If the domain is less than one year old, expect it to be in the supplemental index for some time. The shortest path to earning trust with a new domain is by getting links from aged and trusted domains.
You can see the domain age factor in the search results. There are many "crappy" looking sites parked on old domains that rank very high for very competitive terms.
Rate of New Pages
This is not a big factor with which to be concerned. News websites add thousands of pages per day; it is an expected pattern. If you add 100 or even 1000 pages, Google will be cool with it. Problems come if all of a sudden you add 800,000 pages (or equivalent). This can flag the site and new pages for manual audit.
The rate of new page additions can be an indicator of spam for Google. If sites in various industries go over a specific threshold or act too weird, it can be a sign.
If you're not spamming Google, though, don't worry about this one.
Rate of New Links Added
The rate of new links added might be used as a cue by Google concerning a website. If all of a sudden a site gets 100,000 links in a week, a valid question to ask is - why? Is it due to super-hot stories, increased search volume, a super killer application or some other valid factor? The rate of new links added can indicate that a website should get a "trusted" score or get penalized. The rate can also indicate paid links, which Google despises.
Too many crappy links in a short period of time is usually bad, but if you get many natural or quality links, the search engines will be happy. A burst of quality links can help a site break though the "sandbox."
Next: Link Popularity of a Site >>
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