This question was recently posed on one of the SEO forums that we monitor and it was a very interesting question that we have talked about before and have done a fair amount of analysis on.

The question was essentially this, ".... just how much weight does the age of a website get in the Google ranking algorithm".

And the question was framed in the context of will a website created in 2000 have an age advantage over a site created 2-3 years ago? Of course the sandbox affect for brand new sites is taken out of the equation.

Our simple answer to this is of course the age matters. It matters for your link popularity index, the age of your inbound links, the size of your site and the freshness of your site.

mjtaylor made the following comments: "Well, if there are 100-200 factors and this one is a fairly important one it should be worth a couple of percentage points. I would say this would be more important for a newer site than an older one ... in other words it's a negative factor to get over .... sometimes called the Sandbox ... but once your domain is a year old, the relative value decreases.

Similarly, the age of incoming links is a factor."

She seemed to indicate that the aging factor was predominantly important with regards to the sandbox affect. I agree that the sandbox affect is of a huge importance but for the purpose of this question we are taking the sandbox completely out of the equation. I don't believe the weight of the aging factor goes down after the sandbox affect goes away. The sandbox affect is really a separate issue and definitely plays a role in allowing a brand new site the ability to achieve SERPs but once a site is out of the sandbox it still has to compete against sites that could be 5 or 10 years old.

We have done some pretty extensive analysis and the age of a site seems to play a significant role. Enough so that I think we would consider it one of the top 20 factors in the Google Algorithm. Maybe even top 10.

We always recommend to our Minneapolis SEO clients that if they already have a registered domain name that they haven't completely developed that they are many times better off using the older domain than purchasing a brand new domain name instead.

Peter, a WebproWorld Veteran, also made some very intelligent comments on the basic question of site age: "In my experience I have seen webmasters complain for years that Google is stupid because their website was stuck around position 40. No matter what they did, they just couldn't get the site higher. Then after so many years, all the sudden the site starts to climb and it reaches the top10. Often webmasters try to figure out what they "did" to make that happen. But they didn't do anything special. All that happened was that they finally got to age. This often happens in markets that have been around for many years already. Imagine for example the hosting market. You really need to have a site that is reasonably old because most of the top ranking sites are many years old and the average age factors in this market are pretty high."

In a nutshell and with all factors the same a site that is 5 years old WILL in my opinion rank higher than one that is 2 years old.