In a study to unravel the mysteries of website age as a factor to being classed as an authoritative website in a given search.. I picked the term Apartment Marbella as a relatively strong phrase from a list of many regularly used phrases on the Internet when searching for a popular holiday destination.

Looking at the first page set of results I was curious to understand why these specific ten were presented to me as being the most relevent for what I had chosen as my search phrase when there were clearly other phrases amongst them such as “Apartments for sale” “Rental apartments”. I have realised that the results change considerably depending if I am logged into my email account on the search provider and I thought what that means! Essentially, the provider is collecting my holiday apartments Marbella type phrases and what I click on thus drawing conclusions on what sorts of things I prefer to visit out of the lists that are served up. Is this good? I’m not sure… for instance what if I was truly open to any thing that might be presented to me from an adhoc search or a search looking specifically for a change… Would that result be influenced by a computer selecting a predefined set of sites based on existing preferences… quite possibly because when I’ve signed out, the results change quite a lot. I prefer to see what everybody else see’s when I’m conducting a search and dont need extra filtering because some logic in a computer is trying to second guess what I want to see.

Anyway,back to the search in hand – Holiday Apartments Marbella. which is in Spain for those who’ve never heard of it. The titles shown in the results were all very similar and the descriptions had a fair amount of differing content but I was set on finding out the domain creation date of each of them. There’s many whois lookup sites on the net, all of them show such information so i began recording each of the creation dates in order from one to number ten For the conclusion of earliest first having some bearing I was at least curious to see if the top results showed an older registration date than the ones at the bottom of the first page.

For this illustration I am Ignoring the months in each case… the run of years from number one to number ten goes like this: 2001; 1999; 2004; 2007; 2002; 1996; 2004; 2003; 1999; 2002. From the range of years and how they are as new as 2007 in position four yet 1999 in position 9, its clear that although they all have been around for a few years yet they dont have any direct order to age being the regulator to position. Have you heard of the phrase content is king? its something a lot quarters like to spout as the over riding decision factor and clearly a website with good content properly aimed at its target audience has to be a major benefit to both the site owner as well as the searcher. Looking back at the sites though, I can’t honestly say that is the leading fact either

So it seems that the original hypothesis about older sites do better in search engines is only a part truth…. to satisfy my curiosity I looked at a page set back amongst the 12 page of results and there were plenty of old sites back there too. Clearly its unlikely to get a brand new site to the front of any large search result data set. However there’s clearly many other things at play here in final ordering, including but not limited to, site recommendations between sites, order of words used in the website’s titles etc and maybe even some sort of calculation on how popular the site is through visitors on its pages. Could the search results mirror consumer fashions and trends? was Marbella a hit holiday resort for the glamorous seeking vacations in the upmarket end of Spain way before holiday makers flocked to Portugal for instance? Would my search raised different questions if I’d selected Algarve apartments instead? maybe have a look and join in with the opinions.