For today’s daily dose of algorithm goodness I’m going to look at two criteria together:

• Age of site
• Age of stability

First and foremost, age is important because it helps build your search engine trust.  Think about your real-life encounters with new people.  Do you trust someone you’ve just met?  No… you don’t.  It usually takes time to get to know someone and trust them.

Crawlers - like people - take time to get to know your site and, thus, trust you.

Stability is the same way.  If someone you know goes off and makes a huge change in their lifestyle or behavior it may make you rethink your feelings about them.  Say, for example, someone you’ve known for a while suddenly starts to smoke - and they never did in the past.  Wouldn’t you stop and think about that?  If you’re a die-hard non-smoker that might even make you change your entire attitude toward that person.

Age is something you can’t really do anything about.  That comes with time.  Stability, on the other hand, is.

If I have to make changes to a site, I prefer to do it all at once and get it over with… instead of changing one thing here and one there over the course of weeks and weeks.

If that person we mentioned before started smoking, got a new a job, a new car, and a new house all at once you’d still be thrown.  But the dust would settle much quicker if it all came at once than if they kept making those changes over a long period of time.  You wouldn’t have to stop and wonder about them over and over again.

- Matt