potentialgeek - 6:08 am on Oct 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Matt Cutts, according to a previous post on this board, apparently did a demo at a conference when he personally did a whois lookup to bust a link farm. They have the technology. I suspect, however, it's more likely used in human reviews and rare cases. Still, each year that passes, I am more reluctant to link to any of my other sites. Note that the Adsense code signal is a stronger signal of domain ownership and uses no additional resources. Google already got the code when it crawled your sites (for those who use Adsense).

Domain registration length as a signal of quality, legitimacy, or authority is a very weak signal. It's too easy and cheap to add years. Besides, Google staff have dismissed its value.

Cutts:

"To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling."

Source: [goldsteinmedia.com...]