It seems to me that this is quite a debated subject with webmasters and over the years I have read many comments, threads and blogs about this subject. Now thanks to sitepronews.com it seems the debate is over, for now anyway!
The debate I am referring to is, does the age of a domain name matter that much in search engine rankings? From personal experience over the years, it has always been quite apparent that Google seem to give preferential treatment in their search engine results pages (SERP's) to websites that have been live longer simply due to the trust factor. Of course we all know (or should do) that domain age is just one of many ways in which Google use to rank websites in the organic / natural listings. Saying this, I wanted to write this article as I feel that this issue should not be over looked. As like business offline, a company that has been running for some time is well established and their reputation goes hand in hand with this. This is exactly the same online, the longer a website has been established, the more search engines know about the site and have a much better understanding of it.
This does not mean that if you have a domain that is say, 10 years old but has not been indexed by Google, you will suddenly have a domain name that is considered better than a two year old domain. This is because in Google's eyes, if you have a domain name that is 10 years old but the domain has never actually been a website, it is seen as you only purchased it yesterday, or the day you actually launch the website. It has no juice and in turn will have no relevant natural links pointing to it.
To read about the experiment undertaken on this subject (post panda update) and to see how significant domain age is for your website, you can read the article HERE on sitepronews.com