According to statistics on major search engines, it has a dramatic effect. It seems as though users prefer sites that are more popular and trust-worthy than sites that are younger. This may be because older sites probably are better developed and protected against potential spam than newer sites and people tend to trust sites they view as being more secure. This could allow major search engines to give your site a higher ranking. This can mean that the links on your website have a big impact on the success and ranking of your website. If you have links to older and more proven websites, there is a good chance that your website will be more successful and rank higher. How do you know what links to use and trust? There is a new application on the market called �Ranking Domains Using the Domains Maturity� and it shows a direct connection with the maturity of a web page and how it affects your ranking. Basically, the use of this new application seems to indicate that search engines view younger or newer websites to be more likely to contain spam. This may be because older sites probably are better developed and protected against potential spam than newer sites and people tend to trust sites they view as being more secure. This could allow major search engines to give your site a higher ranking. Part of the reason for this untrusting action of major search engines is because it is easy to get a new domain this days, and a lot of companies are offering free trials to new users. Because of this, there can be bad links and spam rampant on the newer websites. The new application also makes it possible for search engines to assign a value to a specific domain based on its age. This could have a huge effect on the overall ranking of websites and their listings on search engines. Of course, age is not everything. There are many other factors that can be used to determine what rankings your website can plan to achieve. The new application takes dozens of factors into consideration and will analyze your website to help determine how search engines may choose to rank it. If you are not sure how the age of your website affects your search engine ranking, this application may be able to help you discover not only how your website affects the ranking but also how the individual links on your website can affect the results. You may have an older, more mature website, but if you have links on your website that are newer or contain spam, you overall search ranking could be lower because of it. It is important for you to know not only how your website ranks but also how the links on it may be affecting your success. Make sure you know the links on your web pages are secure and not containing any spam that could negatively affect your listings.