Domain Age one of the Biggest Factors

[Brett_Tabke]

Most of us know that the age of a domain is one of the single most important criteria of the Google algo. I'd put it as a top ten - maybe top five - filter. It is a gate keeper.

The real question to me is if that matters on a parked or doa domain? We have some domains 10years old this month that have never had sites on them. I am wondering if there is a default value there because of the age? Is it a pure whois thing? Or is it an age of the inbound links thing?

[Simsi]

While I think domain age is important, Google's aim is to ensure "quality" pages rank high. So one would imagine it will become less important as the algo's mature and become more effective at determing quality content. Same applies for any "non quality" factor.

So IMO any factor that is not quality-driven has a shelf life, although it may be a long one :) I think domain age is quite a good factor as it is trickier to manipulate as opposed to say "backlinks" which would be quicker to be devalued.

[edited by: Simsi at 3:13 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2007]

[appi2]

Sort of been looking in to ranking and age of domains.
Just as an example this is the top 50 for a single keyword on G.co.uk

Year Reg .... Backlinks

00.....1204
01.....1444
00.....187
NA.....937
97.....1069
00.....30
NA.....1943
97.....72
NA.....-
00.....13
NA.....18
99.....255
98.....69709
01.....89
02.....168
96.....10
03.....272
01.....752
03.....103
99.....2165
02.....22
02.....153
04.....15
03.....15818
00.....2020
04.....52
99.....1473
02.....3032
96.....4136
96.....5508
04.....3707
NA.....-
04.....322
NA.....-
NA.....-
03.....1243
98.....1562
NA.....-
99.....569
04.....1021
99.....245
99.....60
02.....172
00.....679
NA.....-
98.....4
NA.....-
NA.....-
05.....106

NA = most of these are GOV sites, the first one is wiki.

Almost all of the sites appear in the archive but one. This is what started me on this, something just didn't seem right. I know most if not all of the other sites that manufacture these products. This one appeared from nowhere and jumped quite high.

Theory? An old registered domain and robots text with deny archive/wayback seems to work.

In that list there's 3 doorway pages and only 2 Affiliate sites (big kiss to G).

Oh and my little site is waaay down past the top 50, but then I changed my 2001 url last year. Boo hoo.

And... quality... don't make me laugh/cry.

[Clark]

You know, I think it's important to understand WHY age is a factor. And I think I know why. It started around the sandbox time. It was then that scraping became so commonplace and sophisticated that google's algo couldn't handle it anymore. So they only trusted sites that were up before that date. Then they used algos that spent months analyzing a new domain. Probably using a combination of factors like how much toolbar traffic it gets, how many links, quality of links, what topic is it.. etc. They probably feel that over 6 months they have a better idea of what the site is all about and can weed out bad ones... Whereas older, proven domains are given a pass.

Personally I think having age as a factor is an admission that their algos just aren't good enough for today's internet.

[activeco]

An old registered domain and robots text with deny archive/wayback seems to work.

I just wanted to post that.
Any parked domain or the one with almost no content should deny all robots (if not all, Google for sure) and indexing.
For such sites already indexed, a request for removal from index and later reinclusion (after reasonable time) could be a good bet.

[the_nerd]

So, while domain age may be a factor...

Brett suggested it is a factor. Looking back to our school days we remember that a factor is always multiplied (not added) with one or more other factors. That said, if one of the 10 factors is zero, your result is ZERO (well not quite, just to get the idea). Aging a "ZERO" website probably doesn't help a lot, but for 2 otherwise identical sites this factor might mean the difference.

To illustrate this: 3 months ago we bought a website that had been registered 10 years ago and was active ever since. We saw that site structure was sub-optimal to say the least. So we just rearranged the old content and traffic is up 10-fold over the last 3 months.

Age alone didn't help, but fixing some other factors brought out the beauty of age ;)

[mfishy]

MY experience is that older domains need to have existing links or else they are not worth much in Google.

As for whois changing hands, I hear a lot about it, but never noticed anything. I ahve bought a few sites and trensfered everything - hoting, registrar, etc...no change in ranking in google at all. Google themselves have like 1,000,000 whois changes :) Too much goes on over the course of 6-10 years for thewhois to stay the same and google knows this. I have had several companies during the past 7 years - it is surely natural to change the whois to the real legal owner. ALl that being said, some smart folk that I trust have said whois changes can bury you, I just havent seen it.

[JudgeJeffries]

I've bought lots of old domains. I have had no luck with the parked domains

[sandyk20]

I have a question here:
One of my leading sites is running on www.somedomainname.co.uk (domain bought and active since May 2002) we have bought .COM of same which was bought and active (for sale) since December 1999 (it was a gaming company)

Should we switch to .COM of our .co.uk?

Our target is UK (traffic from UK)
Will there be any side effects of doing same?

[activeco]

Should we switch to .COM of our .co.uk?

If you're already established and well ranked, no reason to do it.
Just redirect all traffic from .com to co.uk.
Be carefull though. Check if old .com domain is in good standing (not blacklisted, etc.).

[nakulgoyal]

very interesting question, all SEO's and webmasters should ask. I think based on a project I worked on last year, age of the links, "definitely" helps. It looks more like a natural link if it's there for a long time and stays there, instead of a link for 1-3-6 months.

Parked Domains, I don't think they are as good as old archived domains, with actual websites, but they are definitely better then a brand new domain. Anybody else think the same based on some actual work?

[Lou_N_Gerat]

I have a very high-traffic page which is at www.example.com/foo/blue-widgets.html

I want to buy the domain bluewidgets.com so it will be at a URL that is easier to remember when you hear it spoken aloud, and redirect from the old location to the new one.

My example.com domain is almost ten years old, and blue-widgets.html is several years old.

Would I be penalized for moving it?

I did this with some other articles, and it worked out OK, but this one page is my main source of revenue, so I'm leery of screwing it up.

[activeco]

While not recomended, if you really insist on moving to a new domain you may be interested in reading Cutts' blog [mattcutts.com], under the section: Moving to a different domain. Also another Google employee's experience [somebits.com] could be helpfull too.