Originally Posted by TheSquealer

Google made an update many years ago (I want to say the Florida update - it was 04-ish) that went after spam in part by targeting freshly registered domains with unnatural link profiles. Since then, like all other SEO myths, people take the retarded ball and run with it, losing sight of the fact that many many things are far more important and that an aged domain has no real value ONLY because of its age.

Incidentally, this created a massive market where spammers were buying any domain that wasn't freshly registered - making even the most moronic domains worth 50-100 and this was promptly dealt with in subsequent updates.