I own a bunch of sites in a very competitive industry, but I'm beginning to wonder what Google finds most important when actually ranking a web site. I have a site with 40,000+ backlinks from a variety of sources and it is no where to be found within the search engines for a specific keyphrase. While I have another site with roughly 2,000 links that is 8 years old with very few new links being added within the last few years.. and this site is actually ranked #6 for that same keyphrase. This makes me think that the age of the domain and the age of the backlinks can influence the ranking for a web site.
Are these 40k links new? If so you site will gain more power after 6-12 months. Aged backlinks are better than new, fresh links.
I think you're half right. It's not the domain name age, it's how old/trustworthy the links are that are linking into your OLD domain name. The other side of that is if you have a brand new domain name, with just a few high quality links, the same rankings can be accomplished. I've heard a lot of banter/talk lately from a few seasoned SEO's that domain name age is not a factor. That's a little hard to believe but it is possible that domain name age used to be more important a year ago. But, since that was manipulated so much - they tweaked the algorithm to make that less of a factor. So now what is more important are the age & quality of the backlinks linking to the old domain name.
The age of a domain name is more or less meaningless, the only important factor in Google's eyes is the age of the links leading into a domain. If people have been linking to them for 15 years, that is a much bigger deal than a site with links that are a month old.
two factors are important: how many backlinks you have , and how old they are . Links that have been around for a long period of time have more influence.