So you're saying domain age doesn't matter but ranking history does. That is why you should let a new domain sit in position 60 for awhile slowly going up before trick in links?
Yeah the age doesn't matter. A 20 year old domain that's not ranked for anything in 15 years is still going to be in the sandbox when you start using it again.
It'll work fine as a pbn, as ranking and linking are 2 completely separate things. There isn't a "sandbox" for passing link juice.
Even if you have a domain that's been ranking for the past 5 years for gardening and you try to start putting gaming content on it, it's not going to rank well.
The more recent the domain has had rankings in a given niche, the easier it is to build it out again and start ranking in that niche.
There does seem to be a difference with REALLY powerful domains, and they will often rank quicker even in new niches. By really powerful though I'm talking about $5k+ domains.
But even then, they don't always.
Statistically, and I'm talking from direct experience, the quickest way to rank a site is a domain that's had rankings(doesn't have to be huge. Can be a few hundred keywords and 50-100 traffic on ahrefs) within the past 6 months and you re-build the pages either with the old content, or new content and 301 page by page where it's most relevant, and add more, fresh content in that same niche, and keep expanding from there.
This works almost every time and very quickly.
Next is 1 year. This works about 70% of the time. The other 30% you just have to wait longer to start ranking.
Then 2 years, which is about 50/50.
Over 2 years, if the DR is under 40(And by DR I mean REAL DR, ie, the DR is 40+ from good links, not 40+ from garbage. This is a very important distinction. I judge domains by links, but the DR gives you an idea of what the links should look like, if the DR is from legit links. Make sense?)
For DR over 40 and 2 to 3 years, it's about a 60-70% chance to rank fairly easily.
3-5 years you need about a DR 50+ to get good numbers.
2 years with no traffic and a DR 20, will often fail to rank. It will rank eventaully, but it could take 6 months to a year to build up. It gets sandboxed..
The sandbox is obviously related to link quality. It must be otherwise a DR 60 with no traffic in 5 years would be the same as a DR 20 with no traffic in 5 years, but they aren't. This comes from the direct experience of rebuilding close to 1000 domains now, with everything from DR 10's to DR 75's, traffic within 1 month to no traffic for 10 years.
If you want to build a money site:-
Traffic within 6 months: Any DR. Any links. You can pretty much buy purely based on the traffic.
Traffic within a year: DR 25+ - Could be 20, could be 30. You decide. 20, you'll find more, 30, you'll get more to rank faster.
Traffic 1-2 years: DR 40+
Traffic 2-3 years: DR 50+
Traffic 3-5 years: DR 60+
Traffic over 5 years.. I wouldn't bother.
