kneukm03 - 4:27 am on Mar 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

I don't think there's a deliberate aging mechanism in the same sense as Google. It does seem like there are changes in updates that help existing sites as compared to newer ones. I had one site get a couple weeks of link-building factored into the December update, and on obscure, multi-word terms it has gotten some OK rankings on pages added since the update. I have sites built after the update that don't seem to be able to do this at all. So it may be that a site needs to go through an update to be ranked at all on new pages in the interim.

The problem is that I don't think this is some sort of deliberate aging mechanism like Google uses, it's just that they haven't updated their data since Dec. 15th (which I think was October-ish data). It's one thing to use age of a site as a metric in ranking it. MSN has been open about using "freshness" as a bonus in ranking things. Google makes a deliberate choice to trust sites that are older, and while its algorithm is a little more cloudy I think everyone agrees that it likes both old, trusted sites and fresh, updated content. Yahoo's problem involves something that isn't a deliberate part of the algorithm - a failure to include all of the data it has gathered until many months later.

This makes it much harder to apply "age" in any sensible way as a ranking factor. In my opinion at least, you have to be factoring in at both ends - old, established sites probably deserve a benefit over new, unestablished ones, all things being equal. Yahoo's failure to update guarantees that - no one's getting any new sites in until the whim to update their engine takes over again. But it doesn't do anything about the other end - rewarding fresh content. A site that hasn't been updated in 2 years should probably be ranked lower than one that is updated recently, again all things being equal. Information changes, and 2 year old information is generally worse or less useful than 2 day old information. There's a trustworthiness issue at both ends, and the result of Yahoo's current approach is overbroad in favoring age and totally defunct in terms of favoring freshness.