Does Site Age Effect Search Engine Ranking? The Mystery Behind SEO

This subject seems to be very polarized, at least from the group I regularly speak with concerning search engine optimization (SEO) practices and thoughts. You see, a lot of people believe that it is strictly the backlinks and keywords that determine how well you rank in a search engine. Then there are those others, like myself, that do believe that a websites age in combination with regularly updated content will strengthen your chances of being on the top of search engine results. Of course, this means that you also have to get your precious keywords and backlinks as well, but you put that on top of a strong, regularly updated, and well-aged website, then you'll be just that much closer to reaching the top of search engine results.

As I was saying, I believe the age of your website does play a factor. The reason why I believe this, is because search engines don't want to catalog and rank your site very high if your site is only going to be around for a few months, and then poof! Gone. Instead, I believe that if your site has been around a couple to a few years or more, that a website will award bonus points (rank you higher) if you have a seasoned and regularly updated website. The reason why I believe this, is that search engines reward older websites since they know the content will remain for people to read, while newer sites don't have a reliable history yet, it has to be earned with time.

I also believe that particular pages of a website do depreciate with age as time goes on, so your once powerful performing page will gradually work it's way down the list, especially if it's never updated since the time of the initial publication.

Some people believe that a website's age has no factor what-so-ever to the performance of how the site ranks regarding search engines. They believe that it's strictly how you write your content, the keywords involved, and how many backlinks you get.

There is no definite answer as far as we can find, there are rumors floating around the internet, but I think most search engines companies want to keep this information to themselves. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it, what do you think? Do you believe it does impact it? Or not?