Links from popular and trusted web pages have a bigger impact on the search engine rankings of a web page than links from less popular and trusted pages.
A new patent application with the name "Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity" indicates that there is another factor that helps search engines to determine the quality of a web page.
How the new method can be used to detect high quality links
Here's the abstract of the new patent application:
"Ranking domains for search engines is provided herein. To rank a domain, contributing domains associated with the domain are identified. Additionally, the maturity of each of the contributing domains is determined.
A rank for the domain is then determined based at least in part on the maturity of each of the contributing domains. The domain rankings may then be used to order results for search queries."
The patent applications indicates that newer domains are more likely to be spam or part of a link system that tries to game search engine algorithms.
Web pages that have links from older domains may be ranked higher than other domains in the search results.
Why do search engines think that new domains are likely to be spam?
Domain names are cheap and some domain name registrars even offer free domain registration and trial periods.
Spammers can easily take advantage of these offers to build a network of websites that link to each other (a so-called link farm).
The new patent describes how search engines can use the age of websites to specify the value of their links. For example, links from websites that are several years old could have a high effect on the search engine positions of the ranked sites while links from newly created websites might not have any effect at all.
