how important is domain age?

nethead01

nethead01

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In my niche which is a local service business, I have noticed that the companies that are on the first page (for 3 major cities ive checked) are yelp and a few big franchises then there are about 3 regular mom and pop businesses but they all have mediocre websites with thin content but with age of 8yrs or more.

My website has great content and as perfect onpage SEO as I could get but its only 3 months old. Im currently doing whitehat SEO for now and jumped from page 10 to 6 so far.

How hard would it be to compete with these old companies with aged domains? Is it possible for a 6month old or 1yr old website to outrank these websites? The competition I would consider pretty weak other than domain age.
 
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Old domains usually have better Backlink profiles which they have acquired over the years, that is why it is hard to outrank them. You can outrank them though if you can get better and more powerful Backlinks within a short period of time, which is impossible. So give it time, keep acquiring good Backlinks, before you know it you will be competing for top spot.
 
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I think it's EXTREMELY important and one of the top3-5 ranking factors for Google, but I should clarify that I'm talking about SITE age and not domain age. You can pickup an expired 15 year old domain and not rank because Google knows its a new site.

Think about this: Google knows that any chump with $10K to his name can buy 100K words of content and 50 high end guest posts or PBN's, all the social signals, web 2.0's etc. in the world. The one thing you can't buy is more site age (unless you buy an actual site), so it would make sense why they would give an advantage to older sites. Those sites you are seeing in the SERPS with bad content and no links are there just because they're old. This doesn't mean that its impossible to rank with a new site, but you'll have to work much harder than the guy with the aged site.

I'm curious to hear what other BHW members think of this but to me its crystal clear that age is a massive factor.
 
dudeisbroke said:
Who would you trust your life with?

a 2 year old or a 30 year old?
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I don't think domains work that way,it's more like dog years for domains, because a 2 year old domain has enough age to rank, but a 30 year domain could either be dropped a bunch of times or have an old website with badly aged content on it..
 
SunnyLeon said:
I don't think domains work that way,it's more like dog years for domains, because a 2 year old domain has enough age to rank, but a 30 year domain could either be dropped a bunch of times or have an old website with badly aged content on it..
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you may have a point about the dog years. but all else equal a 30 year old domain with a solid backlink profile will dominate the serps more than a 2 year old site.

Also, from my experience new sites take 8-12 months before you start to see significant movement.

i think link age and content age is more of a factor than domain age.
 
dudeisbroke said:
you may have a point about the dog years. but all else equal a 30 year old domain with a solid backlink profile will dominate the serps more than a 2 year old site.

Also, from my experience new sites take 8-12 months before you start to see significant movement.

i think link age and content age is more of a factor than domain age.
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Link age? What!!! Your probably right, I never even thought about that.. but can defiantly see that being a factor too
 
I think it is a very important factor. Usually older ones rank better, but if you put a lot of work in longer content, posting often, more quality backlinks to gain domain and page authority, you can outrank them. it is not impossible, but domain age is still a factor in my opinion.
 
I have a local business stuck at position #11. My google lighthouse reports are all 100, onpage is on point, Schema, GMB optimisation and 50 indexed citations.

For reference my #1 competitor has 31/100 page speed on mobile vs my 100, no on page at all, no schema, GMB is live but filled out like the business owner (with no SEO knowledge) and 3 citations. It isn't really being targeted by anyone with SEO knowledge - I was using the site as a demonstration for a future client.

Only difference? Their site was live since 2014 and mine has only been around for 2 months.
 
Very important. Not impossible to outrank them with good backlink profiles though.
 
Aged of domains is one of the ranking factors for google but it is not the only factor, so you can still outrank old websites.
 
In my opinion Aged domains are preferred. Aged domains are most important for google ranking factors. Aged domains will rank better.
 
Aged domain with good content and quality backlinks is difficult to outrank them. Age of the domain is one among other factor to rank. Have good content and backlinks. Give it some time,you can outrank them.
 
gentzalli said:
I think it's EXTREMELY important and one of the top3-5 ranking factors for Google, but I should clarify that I'm talking about SITE age and not domain age. You can pickup an expired 15 year old domain and not rank because Google knows its a new site.

Think about this: Google knows that any chump with $10K to his name can buy 100K words of content and 50 high end guest posts or PBN's, all the social signals, web 2.0's etc. in the world. The one thing you can't buy is more site age (unless you buy an actual site), so it would make sense why they would give an advantage to older sites. Those sites you are seeing in the SERPS with bad content and no links are there just because they're old. This doesn't mean that its impossible to rank with a new site, but you'll have to work much harder than the guy with the aged site.

I'm curious to hear what other BHW members think of this but to me its crystal clear that age is a massive factor.
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^^ This.

Age of the website and how long it has been in index is a massive ranking factor.

Age of domain, as in when it was registered for the first time or how long it has been registered without a drop is completely irrelevant and has absolutely minimal or no impact on its ranking capabilities.
 
Google consider the domain age also as main factor, and websites like yelp are hard to outrank. They will get more organic backlinks day by day.
 
  1. A domain Without an actual site ( its just domain that was registered by someone for a decade )
  2. a domain with a proper website - Indexed - quality backlinks- for 1-2 years

I will happily go ahead with the second option without giving a second thought
 
Old domain mean people trusted and visited thats the reason its still in the internet. Definitely Google gives imp for this one.
 
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