I ran some tests on google, yahoo, and msn, and it seems like MSN was the most lenient at ranking new domains. What I did was take the top 100 results from the top 300 searches(according to wordtracker) and check archive.org to find out the approximate age of the domain. You can see the results here. Let me know what you guys think.
Aaron Wall says the same thing: He says hes seen a website for a rather competitive term rank in msn's top 10 in a week...that it usually takes 2-3 months before yahoo trusts your site and gives it a chance to rank high...whereas in Google it takes MUCH longer. One thing Im really interested in though is this: Does Google look at site age as a seperate ranking factor in their ranking algorithm or will they not allow a site to rank in the top10 even if it has 10 times as much link popularity as it's competition - only because it's just 3 or so months old? I mean say youre targeting an extreme niche, where the #1 site has 200-300 links and your site comes along with 1000+ links, but it's only a couple of months old. Or say the top sites have only 5 links and you come along with a fairly new site, that has 100's of links. Will you still not be able to outrank competition? P.S.: Can you suggest a good tool for checking site age? Are there tools which can check for not only domain age, but also for the time a site has been in Google's (or Yahoo's or MSN's..) index?
Many experts said that google likes old domains, while msn give some support to new domain. This time I saw some proof.
MSN certainly seems to rank new sites, or maybe new content (??) highly. We ranked well on there way before Google or Yahoo.