Measuring the Quality of a Site

Everyone who has done any SEO work on their site knows that getting backlinks is at least half the battle - if not more. Quality backlinks and quality content have always been, and will always be what makes or breaks a site in the SERPs.

Now, you can go out and get a zillion reciprocated links from any site that will link to you, but 1,000 links from 1,000 crappy sites is worth less than 10 links from 10 quality sites.

Most webmasters rely far too much on the google pagerank of a site to determine it's worth. What they are missing is that, the pr really doesn't stand for much at all - yes having a link from a pr5 is better than a link from a pr0. That's a given. But a more important way to determine how important google thinks a site is should start with the age of the domain name.

Do a search for the phrase you're optimizing for with this super cool Age of top 10 Websites with Backlinks Tool from WeBuildPages.com. You will probably see that the top 10 sites are at least 3 years old - and most of them older than that. Yes, the age of a site is something that google obviously feels strongly about. Authority, respected websites do not pop up overnight -- it takes time. Time to steadily add great content and obtain good incoming links.

So, the next time you're out looking for people to beg a link from, check out their site's age before you think about their pr. Just a suggestion.

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.