Sizing up the Competition

Older sites do better?

[deanril]

Do older sites do better, like 3-4 years on the net .

Looking at my competition from an optimizing stand point, these sites rank very well. But are really messed up, not optimized at all. But I know they have been around along time.

So what Im asking is, If a new site comes down the pipe a lot better off, fully optimized, total Bot-candy, will the older site beat it out?

Thank you for any imput.

Oh forgot to mention New site has just as many back links, and same Pr.

[troels nybo nielsen]

If my memory does not betray me Brett some months ago suggested the possibility that the simple fact of having an old domain may give you an advantage. We had an interesting discussion. My own gut feeling says that it might very well be true, but I have no hard evidence to back that up, and I think that some members told about experiences contradicting that theory. I wonder if anyone could find that thread?

Oh, and welcome to WW. I hope that I'm not the first one to say that?

[deanril]

Thank you sir, and no everybody says it, this is the nicest Forum on the Net. And I mean that.

Well...... Im use to Computer Hardware Forums, heated debates, Amd vs Intel that kinda thing, lol

[europeforvisitors]

Well, I'll describe my experience:

From 1997 through September of 2001, my site was part of a "network of sites" (rhymes with snout.com). In 2001, after parting ways with the network, I relaunched my copyrighted content at the new, independent domain in my profile. It took eight months to get my copyrighted content removed from the old "unguided" site, but during that time, my new site--which had the same content--achieved higher placement on most Google SERPs despite the fact that the older site's home page was PR7 and my new site was PR6.

Today, the old domain still exists on the "network of sites," but with new content and a new Webmaster. It still has PR7 compared to my PR6 (thanks to the PR that it inherits from the network's PR8 home page), but my new domain consistently beats out the old domain in Google.

To me, this suggests that:

1) If you get extra credit for an older site, the extra credit isn't much; and...

2) PageRank is probably less important than "on-page factors" such as relevant content (more specifically, relevant content whose relevancy isn't diluted by off-topic advertising, e-commerce, and navigation clutter).

[Jesse_Smith]

I got atleast four sites on the same topic. For my major keyword, the four sites show up in the order from oldest to newest, along with 5,430,000 other sites. My oldest site is #4, then the next oldest is #27. If it doesn't have to do with age, then the only other reason would be from older sites having more sites linking to them.

[deanril]

Thanks alot, interesting.

europeforvisitors - your story says nope, because your site is newer and better content, from what I read.

Jesse_Smith - your sites reflect that it does has to do with age possibly. Now is your content/optimizing/number of pages/links better on the older site?

[PatrickDeese]

> Do older sites do better, like 3-4 years on the net .

I would guess, and this I hope isn't too obvious, that the main advantage is that these sites usually have tons of incoming links, therefore will out perform a new site even with perfect SEO.

I have several sites related to a travel destination that five years ago returned 113 results in Altavista ~5 years ago.

Now the same search finds ~60K in Google. However several sites that I created in 1998/1999 consistently outperformed new sites, at least for time it took the other sites to accumulate PR via dmoz, yahoo and joe random link maker.

I am currently 2 behind a site that is one entire PR lower than mine, all because the 1st place site has 102 more backlinks than I do.

Or at least I assume that is what the problem is.

[rfgdxm1]

>I would guess, and this I hope isn't too obvious, that the main advantage is that these sites usually have tons of incoming links, therefore will out perform a new site even with perfect SEO.

BINGO. Assuming the site is any good, it is going to pick up unsolicited links from various places on the Net. This will definitely count for something.

[batigoal]

I've got PR6 for one of my pages through the last dance.
The (frame based) site is optimized for a single keyword and is beaten in the SERPS by a page with PR5 with not a single occurrence(!) of that word in the html file!?

How can this happen? My site is not very new, but the link I owe the PR to is.

His site has 40, my one 20 incoming links. Mostly the kw is part of the link text for both pages. Both pages are in the same dmoz category.

so long

ps: sorry for the bad english

[iThink]

I am competing for a place on one of the most spammed SERP on google and this update I am #8 on page-1 with a domain registered around 15th December 2002. It is not a very old domain and this is not the isolated case. Many of my sites built on domains registered in mid or late December -2002 are competing very well for the competitive keywords.

So I assume that there is no significant correlation between age of a domain and its ranking on google at least. It may be one of the large number of factors that affect rankings.

This also applies to alltheweb but I am not sure about other search engines like AV, AJ or Inktomi.

[Jesse_Smith]

:::Now is your content/optimizing/number of pages/links better on the older site?

I've never done any optimizing. My oldest site has the most links pointing to it, and it's the biggest site.