Have you optimized your site's on page factors perfectly and received links from high authority sites in your industry and still can not obtain those elusive competitive rankings? You're probably getting discouraged and ready to throw in the towel or point an angry finger at the search engines which send such free coveted traffic or the person or company responsible for getting you the number one position.

Don't get aggravated and quit just yet; you may not have thought about the age of your domain or the pages of your domain - an increasingly important variable in how the search engines are ranking websites these days.

Every document on the Web has a date of inception (the day or time it was created). Search engines calculate document age (site age also) by making note of the first time their spider/robot noticed the page or a link to the page. Many search engines, especially Google, consider older documents more valuable than new documents, particularly if they have continued to build links over a long period of time - which gives them the appearance of being a more authoritative and trusted site. New documents may be considered more "timely" or "relevant" to time-sensitive queries, but for many other terms the deciding variable may be the length of time it's been available.

Definitely one of the hardest variables to manipulate, your only recourse if you have done everything right is to be patient and continue doing what you know to be the best practice; add good content reguarly and continue building quality links not for the benefit of search engine placement but to drive natural traffic (visitors) to your site.