Should Web Site Age Be A Factor

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 20 of July , 2008 at 8:46 pm

I enjoy watching a little golf occasionally to take a break from SEO. Greg Norman looked a possible winner of the British Open I thought I would spend a few hours watching the game. Do a search on British Open, or British Open Golf and while the number one spot was held by the tournament page, some of the entries where several years old. It begs the question whether or not age should be a relevant search engine optimization factor?

When I do a search I generally want the latest information, not information that is several years old. Even including a year in the search phrase can produce results that way of the mark. For general news and sport you have the ‘news’ option - however that doesn’t cover every situation.

We are told that age of a website is an important SEO factor. Obviously older sites have an advantage and will possibly have accumulated a lot of links. These links more than anything else boost the rankings of these sites and therefore they will appear in the search results ahead of any new site.

For many people, this is a flaw in the process and the search engine algorithms. More often than not we are looking for the latest up to date information on a particular topic not information that is several years old.

Search engine optimization can be a frustrating business particularly when you are trying to outrank pages that were once popular but not out of date. If it frustrating for us, then just think how frustrating it is for users trying to search out the latest information.

Category: SEO

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