Many environmental variables are frequently used to predict values of soil in locations where they are not measured. Digital soil mapping (DSM) has a long-standing convention to describe soils as a function of climate, organisms, topography, parent material, time and space. It is obvious that terrain, climate, parent material and organisms are used frequently in the prediction of soil properties while time and space factors are rarely used. Time is the indirect factor for the formation and development of soil. Moreover, it is very useful to explicit and implicit estimates of soil age for DSM. However, it is often difficult to obtain time factor. In the absence of explicit soil age data, geomorphologic data are commonly related to soil relative age. Consequently, this study adopts the geomorphologic types (genesis type of geomorphology) as surrogate to the time factor and analyzes its effect on DSM. To examine this idea, we selected the Ili region of northwestern China as the study area