Using Age Of A Domain To Calculate Relevance
At SEO By the Sea, Bill Slawski has a post on a patent filing by Microsoft in using the age of a domain to reduce the impact of link farming on search engine results. The concept uses the information obtained from the domain hosting a site to calculate the age of the website.
This patent application assumes that newer domains have a "higher likelihood of being spam and/or being a part of a web farm that attempts to artificially inflate domain rankings for domains in the web farm."
By looking at the age of domains that link to those newer domains when determining a rank for a domain, domains which have links from older domains "may be ranked higher than spam domains and/or less relevant domains."
The concept is novel in that it does not affect the rank of the source page as such but affects the rank of a page linking to the source page and looking to benefit form the link 'juice'.
The technique does seem to theoretically be very effective in curbing link farming but that means to have a relevant site you have to now onwards be really consistent and regular. Posting regularly over a long period of time must now make a difference in the rankings for a site.
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By Article Submit, April 28, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
But what if your site’s not that old but it’s linked to an old domain for a valid cause (no spammin’). How will that be measured?
By Pam P, May 3, 2008 @ 10:14 am
Great information! Consistency seems to be key.
By Arun, May 4, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
@ Article Submit
In that case you are relying on link juice and that means you do get some relevance for linking to a relevant article. But it does not count as much as when a pretty well established domain links to your article. That is worth its weight in gold