Does Link Age Matter?

Whenever you get a brand new link from another site, it is my opinion that the link is in a "probation period" of sorts.

The search engines will find that link and know that it's a new link pointing to your site. But what they care about is whether or not that link has staying power.

Purchasing links to your site in order to unnaturally inflate your sites importance has been placed on the list of "things you shouldn't do" at least at Google.

Whenever someone purchases a link to their site, they'll by and large only do so for 30-days, maybe longer.

So it's my belief that the search engines take these new links with a grain of salt. If that link is still there 31-days later, 60-days later or even 200-days later signals to the search engines that it's not an artificial link but rather one with that staying power.

Sites that link to you of their own accord, that is, like your content and the information you provide, will generally place a link to you from their site and typically it stays there for a good long time.
Like a domain name that gets better with age, so do links.

So if you haven’t already, start working on getting good quality links back to your website that can start to mature. And whatever you do, do not purchase links.