Sgt_Kickaxe - 7:57 am on Oct 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

My thought is that smaller sites have less leeway in making mistakes. Things such as horrid markup, a poor link graph, a high bounce rate with low interaction and *gulp* too many affiliate links likely hurt a small site to a larger degree than a more established and well known site.

When you're just starting out the little things matter more, imo, because you haven't built any positives(esp incoming links) yet to counter-balance the negatives. The good news is that newer sites likely have fewer off-site issues to resolve.