Google's algo and the age of domains.

The recent changes happening at Google seem to indicate a much larger emphasis on the age of a website. I recently investigated the top 20 websites for my sought-after key phrase ( a very competitive one ) , and found that the domain names were all registered prior to 2002. Most of them were older than that, some dated back to the 1990's.

It would appear that the older a domain name is, the more credibility google is giving it. In the long run, this approach might just be what the search engines need to crowd out the thousands and thousands of scraper site, adsense sites, and other garbage sites that are clogging the serps.

Another interesting affect will be the cost of acquiring old domain names. If the age of a domain name is more important than the actual name of the domain name, you can bet your bottom dollar that any domain over 4 years old is about to become quite a valuable commodity.

If you want more information on the latest Google update, check out Jim Boykin's SEO Thoughts and Rand Fishkins SEOmoz.org. Both make some interesting reading and offer a lot of insight into Search Engine Optimization.