Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Is there much evidence to support the idea that the age of a domain/site has any effect on eventual PageRank and position in SERPs?
More specifically beyond the fact you have had less time to get backlinks etc, are you artificially held back, say, up to one year, or 18 months?
Please note this is independant of any sandbox type effect whereby brand new sites are completely invisible up to 8 months or so. I'm talking about the period immediately after this. I have noticed many people making comments about sites less than a year old etc.
Thanks in advance.
- A brand new domain registered and activated around 20th Jan.
- A link from a site with TB PR3, current PR5
- Site indexed by google and MSN within the same week, and by Yahoo within 10 days.
- The site started to receive referrals from Google by the end of Jan.
- Currently, the site ranks among top 10 both in G and MSN index for a couple of keyphrases, and receives a decent traffic mostly from Google (70 - 100 uniques/day).
The site owner is very happy, and I am very excited and watching anxiously if it will be sandboxed eventually.
My humble conclusion: age is only a factor among many others. A link from a site with relatively high authority counts more. Such an authority link may be overriding/eliminating the sandbox effect (a point that I am in a position to verify now with this nice example).
The smaller the niche the less filtering and sooner you can achieve traffic. This is partly the reason why sites competing for high comp keywords often do well on subpages that have less competition. Many sites that are even sandboxed will have niche pages doing well in the Google Serps.
Is there much evidence to support the idea that the age of a domain/site has any effect on eventual PageRank and position in SERPs?
Lot's of evidence to support that age of a domain and site have an effect in the SERPs. Google even states in their newest patent that these are criteria they look at. How much weight they base on each of these variables specifically is tough to say, but my guess is alot of weight is placed on this.
The internal pagerank of any given page is calculated using several variables, a couple of which are the value of the pages linking to the document, the length of time those links have been in place and relevancy.
Hope this helps
Lot's of evidence to support that age of a domain and site have an effect in the SERPs. Google even states in their newest patent that these are criteria they look at. How much weight they base on each of these variables specifically is tough to say, but my guess is alot of weight is placed on this.
Yep, it's not like a few years ago when every pertinent new site that had some decent inbound links would show on the first few pages two weeks after the first deepcrawl. Ironically, G is now battling the spam sites they fostered with Adwords and Adsense - grab and dash MFA crap. Longevity is an indicator of quality. I like to think that G will crash and burn some day, along with their money-grubbing totalitarian approach to the net, and there will be no more Adsense... some other billboard company on the freeway will probably just replace it though.
