Here’s one thing that has always struck me as odd: Why is it that age leads to credibility? I’ve wondered this since I was young.

Back in third grade, my teacher was explaining that you could fold a square two different ways to make it match, top to bottom and left to right. At this point, my friend and I who were usually some of the nerdier kids in the class scratched our heads.

He raised his hand and said, “Can’t it be done four different ways? Top to bottom, left to right, upper left corner to bottom right corner and upper right corner to bottom left corner?” I, naturally, agreed with him, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure there are four ways to do this.”

Well, much to our dismay, she disagreed. Not only that, but being older than us (and our teacher) she expected us to relent our silly pursuit of the truth. We did no such thing.

We continued to pester her about how there really are more than two ways to do it (which, I’m sure at this point in my life she knew we were right, she just didn’t want to look bad in front of the other students), but she wouldn’t cave.

That’s when she made us change our colors! (For those of you who don’t know, it was her way of punishing us — we had to march in front of class and flip our color cards, letting everyone know we had been bad.)

This was the first, and only, time that I ever had to change my color in my entire scholastic career — and all because the older person thought she was right!

This relates to my current age conundrum. Here’s the deal: the algorithm for most all search engines (Microsoft just announced that Live will start doing this too) heavily weight the age of the domain when giving rankings. This implies that because a domain is older that it naturally has better information and is a better resource for people.

Let’s be serious though, this just isn’t true! I chalk this up to laziness on the programmers part on not knowing a better way to add credence to a domain. However, I’m sure that there is a better way. There are enough people working on the algorithms for the different companies that domain age shouldn’t be as important as it is.

Until this happens though, domain age is important for SEO. So, for those of you out there looking to start a site or a web business, check out what domains are currently parked (bought by someone else and waiting for an offer) before you make a decision on your name. The $1,000 or so you might spend upfront for an old domain that had no information on it before you got it will pay off in getting you out of the sandbox quicker.

As dumb as that seems.