How much does a domain's age affect its ranking?

We have a question from JayZ in Ohio who asks, how much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?

My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not very much at all.

In fact, Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently me because there were some registrars that were sending around emails that said, Did you know that Google gives you a bonus in ranking if you register your site for three or more years?

And just to clarify that's not based on anything that we've said, the only thing that that might be coming from is that we did file a patent that basically said, we can use historical data in our ranking, so you could, in theory, look at how many years the site has been registered for, just like you could look at the history of the site to say whether you think it's high quality or low quality.

But we have a lot of ideas, and we find a lot of patents, and that doesn't mean that all of that gets used in our ranking.

So I don't want people to jump to the assumption that just because there was one patent filed in 2002 and 38 claims down, somebody said, Well, you could look at how many years the site is registered for and to jump to the conclusion that we use that in our ranking.

So my short answer is make great content.

Don't worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for.

Just because someone sending you an email that says Google does or even may use this in ranking doesn't mean that you should automatically take them at face value.

What makes a really big difference is the quality of your site and the sort of links that you have pointing to you not. Is my site registered for three or four years years instead of one or two years.