Domain age matters..

This is just an observation of mine and i thought id share it with you guys..
and yes i know there has been a lot of debate on this topic but like i said id like to share my experience, maybe it helps someone out.

my main site is software related and I have done a lot of work on it.. on page and off page.. but recently noticed a new site slowly rising up the ranks.. in a couple of months it out ranked my site and is now at rank 5 on page 1.. whereas im still on page 2.

looking further into the case i found out that his on page seo was just ok.. nothing extra ordinary and his off page seo was half of what I did.. but still he maintains his rank..

its only when i looked into the whois data i realized that he had registered his domain for 10 years...

and on every seo tool i used my seo work was more than his and better.. so his high ranking can only be due to the trust google has put into him due to his 10 year domain registration..

btw.. my domain is 1 year old but i renew it for 1 year only.

so next time when u register a domain try to go for atleast 3 years.. if you can afford it.. it may help

Another thing to look at is how long he has had his links compared to how long you have had yours. I have noticed during the last couple of Google updates that links seem to be given more weight as they age. Even though he may have less links than you if he has had a bunch of them for years they are probably doing him a lot more good than the ones you have only had for a few months.


It really makes sense if you think about it. A link should be worth more if it sticks around for awhile.

well-established sites have old domain names, so by reverse logics, an old domain should mean that the site is well established;

spammers register and drop domains quickly, thus logically spamming sites usually have newly registered domain names.

Generally, webmasters agree that domain age is hardly a powerful ranking factor but opinions vary:

it can be no factor at all;
it can play only a single minor factor in the millions of other factors (but it still is).

I believe it is a factor as well. I don't know about the renewal time, I doubt anyone except your register can or should know how many years you renew for. I think it's more based on how long the domain has been up in general. I know that the domain I am competing with right now for my chosen keyword is older than mine by almost a year plus has a PR of 2 to my 0 and that's why he stays ahead of me, but he is also above domains that ate 5 years +. So yeah I believe it is a factor but as websuperman said one of many.

One thing I would add is that one of my sites had more backlinks, PR etc than any competition. I decided to extend the domain registration by 3 years, just to see if it made a difference and moved from pos 6 to pos 2 in my niche overnight.

Maybe just a fluke, but worth looking into.

My opinion on this is the age of the domain really does not matter. It matters with the traffic and links back to your site. I have a networking site that I changed the domain name about 4 months ago. This means the domain is only 4 months old. My PR rating is a 3. The old domain which I had for 4 years was only had a PR of 1.

If we placed a subdomain on an aged domain, will the subdomain assume the same age as the aged domain?

its only when i looked into the whois data i realized that he had registered his domain for 10 years...

Click to expand...

Just to clarify, are you saying that the domain is 10 years old, or the domian is new and the owner paid for 10 years at the time of registration?

domain age definitely matters, its all about authority

I don't doubt it, most people who buy domains never do anything with it or not for very long. When you buy one for 10 years it shows your serious about it and plan to be established a long time.

Domain age is a strange thing... Here are a couple examples that don't make sense:

One domain I own since 2006 shows in whois domaintools 'whois history' since 2007-10-08, but as 'IP history' it reads 6 years. I definitely own this domain since 01-2006 and I'm very sure it was never registered before. And when I use Marketsamurai or Traffic Travis, both say my domain age is 2 years. And the archive.org waybackmachine has entries for my site since 2008.

I have similar conflicting results for other domains I own. One shows in archive.org first time in 2004, but whois shows it as registered in 2009.

I don't doubt that domain age plays a role as M. Cutts always confirms it, but I really wonder how the age is determined by Google as everybody seems to have his own way of calculating it.

There is no doubt in my mind that domain age plays just one part of the 200+ G algorithms. The question is how much of a part it plays. I can testify to domain age far outranking sites of a lesser age. I have done it myself with an older domain which I never really used. Once I decided to pick up the baton and put some decent content on the domain it rose up the rankings very quickly. An interesting point here is the context of the aged domain......

The site was languishing for a mild porn related niche for around 3 years. I changed all the content on the site to a mainstream movie related niche and after just a few weeks of big G reaching the site it was straight into position 3-4 for a competitive movie related review keyword.

This demonstrates the power of domain age - the site still ranks fairly well for the keyword although I have not done any further work on it....

domain age is also one of the factors on SEO but not very important factors

i get my own sites ranked for some keywords more than other domain which is more old then my domain.

my site getting ranked on page 1 (rank 2) when the domain name is only 4 month old.

the most important factors for getting ranked is by doing excellent onpage seo and link building based on my experience.

i never bought age domain name, all of my domain are new but with correct onpage seo and link building i had done, i had dominating google with the keywords i'm targeting

just my 2c