Hey there,

I have 2 questions:

1) Say you have 2 sites. One is 6 months old and has 200 ('natural looking')links. The other one has only 10 links, but is 3 years old. Which one wins?:-)
(wondering just how important site age really is)

2) They say, that keywords in the URL are only seen as such by the SEs if they are seperated by hyphens. I read keywords weren't so important for rankings themselves, but made it easy to get keyword rich anchor text.
Does this mean, that if somebody links to my URL using it's exact wording - w/o hyphens - that the SEs won't see I have keywords in my anchor-text?!

thx

New Kid On The Block,

1). Difficult to say since there are so many more factors involved than just the age of you links. All things being equal (they really never are) the aged site should perform better but again, its difficult to say.

2). Keywords in your url may help if, for example, your url is blue-widgets.com, then probably most anchor text to your site would be blue widgets. Whether you url is bluewidgets.com or blue-widgets.com makes only a minor difference and wouldn't be worth worrying about IMHO. I would personally use bluewidgets.com because that would be easier to remember and type.

Hi,

as for question 1:

Say I search for a keyword on google and I analyze the link profiles for the first few sites (say #1-#5) and none of them has more than 20 links. But those domains might be 3 years old.

Now an SEO tries to outrank those sites. After 6 months, he has 250 (mostly quality) links for his new site. Would that site be able to outrank the sites with the only 20 or so links or does Google place so much emphasis on site age, that it's almost impossible for new sites to outrank old/well-trusted sites, even if all the other things (linkprofile, onpage optimzation,etc.) are way better for the new site?

Basically, I'm just wondering how heavily site age is really factored in for Google's algorithm (maybe somebody has an approximate idea from experience with Google).


as for question 2:

I would definitely prefer bluewidgets.com to blue-widgets.com as a domain name (b/c its easier to remember), if the benefit of the hyphen is really just a slight one (which seems to be true as most ppl say it).

But what I really dont get: if the SEs can only see the keywords in the URL if they are seperated by a hyphen and a lot of people link to you using your URL in their link text, then the hyphen would give a big benefit, wouldnt it?

unless a)Its not true that the SEs only see keywords in the URL/link text if they are seperated by a hyphen. Thus they are able to see, that the link text 'bluewidgets.com' contains the keywords 'blue' + 'widgets'

or b) Hardly anybody links to a site using it's domain name.

Is it a) or b)?:-) or yet another thing I dont understand, yet?

thx