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Is Domain Age – An SEO Factor?

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Question: Is Domain Age an SEO Factor or Not?

The simple answer to the Question is: Yes, Domain Age is a Ranking Factor & Google cares about your indexed age.

As Matt Cutts stated:

“Domain age does play a role, but a small role & it’s not a very strong ranking factor as compared to others.

The main Problem associated with buying Old Domains is you have to find out with what it was associated before? Because domains that get Expired may have to be used before for the purposes of Gambling, Spam, Illegal Content, Adult Websites etc.

So, if Search Engine finds out the Profile History of the expired domains, then your Website will never Rank.

Here’s an Amazing Thing:

We have done a full research & have given practical examples for the Topic which will clear all your doubts.

Is Domain Age really an SEO Factor?

And the Results that we got, left us Amazed

That’s when we decided to write about & let everyone know the Truth.

The Best Part is:

We have covered everything from the basics:

What is a Domain Age?

Is Domain Age, SEO Factor?

How to find an Old Domain?

Let’s get started.

What is a Domain Age?

Domain Age refers to the Age of the URL(example – www.domain.com) when it was first Registered.

Just to make it clear, here Domain Age means, when was the first time a Search Engine had crawled your Website. It should not be confused with the year a Domain was bought.

So for Example, If a domain is 10 years old, Google will count its age from the day it was first Indexed, not from the Day it was bought.

Is Domain Age an SEO Factor?

Probably Yes, because we have seen that, Google gives a much more preference to Old Aged Domains.

Google cares deeply about the age of both your website and its content.
A brand new site that’s a newcomer to Google is going to have a hard time to rank for any searched keywords in SERPs(Search Engine Results Page) than a website that has Indexed age.

How important is domain age as an SEO factor?

In a Video Uploaded on the Google Webmasters Official Channel, Matt Cutts states that: – we should not bother much about Domain Age, as a Ranking Factor. There are other Factors where you should give more Importance like Content & Link Buildings.

Question: – How does Google determine Domain Age? Do they Look at the whois data or do they Rely on the Crawler? E.g. When it was first indexed. In general, How Important it is for the Website Authority?
Thanks!”

Matt Cutts Replied that:- “Good Question. So the First thing that you need to know that the whois data is not generally available even if you were a registrar. And whois data can vary from country code TLD. For Example,.co.jp, .fi, for Finland, .in for India.And in general sometimes, whois data is on Websites. So what’s much easier is to say, when did we first crawl a website, when did we first see a website? We did actually file a patent on using historical data in the search results and that was issued, I think back in 2005. So, there are a lot of ways that you can think about the age of a domain.For Example, when did you first see a link to a domain as opposed to when did you first crawl it? And there are a lot of things you can look at like, how stale is the data and the stuff like that. But a good way to think about it is often the vast majority of the time we’ll have coverage for when we first crawled a domain or when we first saw a link to a domain, and that’s going to be a lot more useful data than, perhaps whois data that you might be able to get for every single domain. So, in general, how important is it for the website authority? Well, my answer is not to worry that much. The difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one-year-old is really not big at all. So long as you’ve been around for at least a couple of months, a few months, you should be able to make sure that you are able to show up results. So, a lot of people are talking about oh, I want to get pre-aged domains or I want to get domains from 1994 or something like that. And that’s not typically something that you need to worry about. I would say it’s often good to go ahead and buy a website, put up a placeholder page to tell people what’s coming, and just go ahead and develop the website. And by the time you get your website live, often that’s two or three months down already. So, something to bear in mind, whois data is not generally available even though Google is a registrar a whois registrar is not something that you get automatically from being a registrar. Whereas where you can crawl the web, you end up finding new domains relatively quickly after they’re registered because of the link to those domains. And when you first crawl a domain or when you are first able to see a link to a domain, it can very nice way to measure how old a domain is. So, a lot of the times whenever you’re saying OK, search over some given subject— you know, Mayan art. You can see on the left-hand side there’s now a place where you can slice & dice by different dates. So that’s actually a combination of different dates, but for example, it could use when we first saw a page or when we first saw a domain name. you might also take in account when it was last updated, all that sort of stuff. But in general, I wouldn’t obsess about trying to have an Old domain. The fact that it’s mostly the quality of your content and the sort of link you get as a result of your content that determines how well you are going to rank in the Search Engines.”

But, we have some Examples, that will Blow your Mind: –
(Just an estimate, not actual numbers)

URLDomain AgeDaily TrafficAvg. Monthly Traffic
http://www.quicksprout.comCreation Date: 12-sep-2005358,02311,098,713
http://neilpatel.comCreation Date: 11-oct-199729,075901,325
http://moz.comCreation Date: 29-apr-1998405,14512,559,495
http://searchenginewatch.comCreation Date: 20-mar-1998340,19710,546,107
http://searchengineland.comCreation Date: 26-jul-2006760,10023,563,100
http://backlinko.com/Creation Date: 02-Jul-201240,3401,210,200

They are what we call them as “The Giants of Internet Marketing World”.

Look at the Domain Age of these websites, Most of these domains are already(more than) 10 Years Old.

Now, we can surely say that Major Search Engines see Domain Age as a major ranking factor. Their metrics speaks how much Google Trusts them.

Read our detailed guide on how a ccTLD can affect SEO.

We’ll also guide you to buy Expired Domain in the Next Section:-

How to Find an Expired Domain?

Ok, you have read the whole Blog & have convinced yourself to buy an Expired Domain. Seems Interesting.

First of All, buying a Great, Spam free, Expired Domain can be really Hard & Time-consuming. So, get ready for it & grab some Coffee.

In general, the best place to buy an Expired Domain is https://www.expireddomains.net & it’s kinda Search Engine where you can find many Expiring Domains.

Register there for free, & look for Expired Domains, with a High-level TLD, most preferably “.com”

Now, you’ll see, there can be millions of Deleted Domains, but you need to find the best one, There’s a Filter Option, you can filter domains by type, name, Dmoz Entry etc.

We preferably choose domains with Dmoz Entry because the Spam chances decrease gradually.

After applying the Filter, the list will come down in 1000’s.

We can also sort domains by their Linking Root, a number of backlinks, PageRank, Crawl Test, Availability etc.

We preferably sort by the DP option(linking root domain), because it shows the number of unique domains linking to it.

Choose the best Domain from the list, and check the Link Profile(this is very important), paste it in any of the Site Explorer of your choice.

The very 1st thing to look for in this is Referring Pages for Anchor Phrases(it shows anchor text distribution from the backlinks), it should have Natural Link Profile.

Next, go to http://research.domaintools.com/

Paste the URL & you will get the Registrar Information, & also how many times the domain was dropped.

If it looks good, buy that Domain.

Read more about how private vs public domain registration & domain registration length act as major ranking factors.

Let’s conclude:-

We are going, to be honest with you, whenever we do competitor research for any of the Client, we always wondered why Google places Old Aged Domain higher in their Rankings?

Because:

They matter-

“Domain age does play a role, but a small role & it’s not a very strong ranking factor as compared to others.

The main Problem associated with buying Old Domains is you have to find out with what it was associated before? Because domains that get Expired may have to be used before for the purposes of Gambling, Spam, Illegal Content, Adult Websites etc.

So, if Search Engine finds out the Profile History of the expired domains, then your Website will never Rank.

Read our guide to find out how domain history can affect your SEO.

You must be a pro at finding the right Expired Domain or else it can do more loss than benefit

If you still want to take a chance, make sure that you are very good at it, or else, you have to face the consequences from Search Engines.

Let us know in the comments if you have faced any issue in figuring out Domain Age as an SEO Factor, and what was your conclusion on the same.

UPDATE 1 (March 17)

In this section we will give you live updates(with examples) of our current rankings. We will also show you what worked for us & what did not.

So, for the Keyword: “domain age seo factor”, our current page is ranking on the 19th(2nd page) position of the SERP. We are outranking other websites which have more Links & better index age than us. Now, we know 19th is not a great position, but it has improved. The positions are fluctuating, but its not cracking on to the 1st Page. The best position we acquired was 13th.

Remember, We have not built a single link yet & as everyone knows this is a new domain the Domain Authority(DA) & Page Authority(PA) is 1.

Ranking on the 1st page are some posts written back in 2008/2010. This is solely because of the trust they have built overtime in the eyes of Google.

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2 thoughts on “Is Domain Age – An SEO Factor?

  1. The blog was absolutely fantastic! A lot of great information which can be helpful in some or the other way. Keep updating the blog, looking forward to more content. Very informative!

    1. Thank you for your kind words. We are looking forward to publishing more super-useful content for the SEO community.

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