Link Age as SEO factor?

[VividLime]

Hi Guys
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx

We will be doing the standard redirects etc

However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s

He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect.

Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot'  In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space.

So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect.

-But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about.

So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ?

If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

[RyanKent]

If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

My answer to you is NO. But you should be aware there is at least some dispute on the topic.

The SEOmoz point of view (which I agree with): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday

Another point of view: http://www.the-system.org/2011/01/google-algorithm-change-attacks-spam-or-does-it/

[RyanKent]

If I  update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?

My answer to you is NO. But you should be aware there is at least some dispute on the topic.

The SEOmoz point of view (which I agree with): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday

Another point of view: http://www.the-system.org/2011/01/google-algorithm-change-attacks-spam-or-does-it/

[Hurf]

Update your links to get back 100% of your link juice back.

See here for more info: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/48932/link-age-vs-domain-age

EDIT: DANG! How quick are you Ryan ;o) Were you at Vivid Lime's house when he started writing the question?!?

[RyanKent]

apparently I was quick enough to answer it twice before you could answer once

I tried to delete the 2nd post but I get a site error. C'est la vie!

[oznappies]

From a developer's point of view: If you do not already have the new system in place, I would suggest a MVC move rather than aspx on the dotnet platform and put a cfm handler in place to map the pages at the controller level. Goggle will not know know there has been a change and you site will perform much faster. Microsoft is tending to move away from the aspx to the more structured mvc version anyway.

[Hurf]

Ho ho ho! Very whimsical indeed

For your sanity you should know there has been issues with this for all of us recently - and Delete Reply doesn't work

( Hmmm, I wonder if SEOMoz will get penalised for all of this duplicate content??? )

[Getz.pro]

Link age is not a factor.

Strength of domain/page the link is coming from is a factor. (would you want a day old link from the front page of SEOmoz, or a two year old link from your buddies blog?)

The only reason link age is thought to be a factor is that the older the link, the older the page the link is coming from, and the older the page the more time it has had to build more authority, thus pass more juice.

Great idea on getting those links manually changed!!!

[KeriMorgret]

The dev team is aware of the duplicate posting issue. I delete duplicate posts when I see them, but occasionally get errors myself.

[KeriMorgret]

Do you have the option of not displaying the extension on your URL? That way no matter what underlying language you use, you have the same URL and don't have to worry about updating links in the future.