Question: Value of Aged Domains

I found a 4 year old domain for a big niche that is selling for only $50. It has the keyword in the name and the potential to be a moderately profitable ecommerce site built on datafeeds and article marketing, but I can keep the site up and profitable pretty much forever. Think about a broad term like "pillows" or "shoes" or something basic like that. Like "ThePillowStore.com", "AShoeBox.net" or something cheezy like that. My question is, is it worth paying $50 for the domain name just because of the age, or is it not worth that amount of money? The site currently gets like 200 visitors / month without being marketed. PR=0. Ranked on Google SERP page 31, number 304 out of 830,000 results. There are only 280 searches for the specific keyword phrase in the domain name, according to google. Google cuts me off for/from automated searches when I hit page 50 while searching for a broader keyword result. The backlinks need work and there are *no* articles published for this site. I think it has some long term potential.

depends on what the niche is, as to whether or not it's worth the price.

but yes...domain age does matter...and $50 is a pretty small price to pay.

buy it

I think I would purchase this domain. As an example, I have a domain name that I set up on my hosting account several years ago. There is no content - zero, nada, nothing - yet this domain shows up on page 2 of Google for a fairly competitive keyword. If I could just stop f...ing around I would throw in some adsense and a couple of affiliate links. Maybe this weekend....

I agree...Buy it... $50 for a 4 yo... and the niche works...sweeet

Definitely get it! my blog has been around since march 2001 and ranks highly for alot of keywords with a PR of 0.

I would buy the domain. If that's the case, $50 is very cheap.

if I will be given that kind of opportunity, I will buy also that aged domain

I would check it on waybackmachine first to make sure it doesnt have a bad history, and then check to see if it has any backlinks and then decide..

Where did you find this domain. Has it had content on it up until now. Will google treat it as a new domain after you buy it?

I would buy it as well.

can someone post here how to buy a domain and how do you know its age. I look at go daddy and I see where you can buy domains but dont see where they display the age or other pertinent data about the domain.
Thanks

To check the domain age, go to hxxp://whois.domaintools.com

I actually have a question relating to this thread as well.

Does an expired domain lose its age? I understand that an expired domain will have its records deleted from the registrar and all the whois information will be gone. Doesn't that mean that search engines will treat this as a new domain with no age at all?

Jack Doug said:

Does an expired domain lose its age? I understand that an expired domain will have its records deleted from the registrar and all the whois information will be gone. Doesn't that mean that search engines will treat this as a new domain with no age at all?

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its not an expired domain...hes goin to buy it from the present owner before it expires...

an expired domain, though, will lose its age....

I'm not even sure this domain is still for sale. I know the URL but cannot find the site it was being sold at, so I just emailed the owners. It is not flippa or sedo, I just checked.
The 27 backlinks it currently has are from free directories and it is still ranked #37 in the SERPS.

It is an html based site that has great content, the owner is a knowledgable hobbyist but it's not monetized. I could convert it to wordpress and optimize the hell out of it, crank it full of adsense, senuke it/article market it, throw up a Popshops widget, clickbank widget, and Amazon widget - spend a day promoting it, and move on. Keyword optimization, a Linkwheel, and Article Marketing + SEnuke alone could push it to the second page of the SERPS. A news page with a constantly updated feed and auto-posting to twitter would push it up to the top of the second page, possibly the bottom of the first page of the serps. I don't think the niche itself is profitable- it's lame, and it's not a longtail for another niche. It's *related* to another niche that is very profitable and popular. I'm sure I could NOT make a profit though, if I focused on the niche it serves. It's basically an accessory item that many enthusiasts like to buy or build in support of their hobby and lifestyle. It would be like starting a site focusing on shoelace collectors, and not trying to break into the SERPS for shoes but instead I would be trying to monetize by sending the visitors to zappos.com. I don't know how to explain it better without giving away the niche.
I think I could build the traffic and audience by doing blog commenting and PRstorming relevant sites for the connected, main niche. Flipping the site is also a possibility, but I think I'd like to see what I can do with this.

@troybh an awesome, free site with the tools you need for domaining:
domjax.com/
Sites to buy/sell domains:
flippa.com sedo.com, sitepoint and forums.digitalpoint.
Traffic can be faked in order to crank up alexa rankings, so personally I wouldn't buy any site based on traffic estimates, but I would buy it based on SEO/SERP potential, backlinks, and your ability to improve the site.

bigman said:

its not an expired domain...hes goin to buy it from the present owner before it expires...

an expired domain, though, will lose its age....

Click to expand...

Aww...

I thought I got a good deal - $7.67 for a 5-year-old.

But since you said expired domains doesn't keep it age, then I guess mine didn't as well.

bigman said:

its not an expired domain...hes goin to buy it from the present owner before it expires...

an expired domain, though, will lose its age....

Click to expand...

I'm a bit confused, when people talk about buying aged domains, they actually talking about buying non-expired aged domains from the owners?? What about those aged domains that sold at godaddy auctions and those at freshdrop.net? Are they expired??

so expired domains lose their age? This can be really pathetic in terms of SEO wise.

I remember asking a fren to buy an expiring domain for me. Then he told me that I need to wait for a certain period of time so that when the domain owner doesnt renew his domain, then i can buy it. So in effect, I am waiting for the domain to expire before i buy it. And when i got the domain, I checked the whois information....and the created date was years before!

Does that mean that expired domains do keep their age?

Any other experts here who can verify on this?

expired domain means,.. record delete.

Grabbing the dropping names retain age. But how do google treat ?

dvishnu said:

expired domain means,.. record delete.

Grabbing the dropping names retain age. But how do google treat ?

Click to expand...

Sorry dude...what's d difference between a dropped name and an expired one?

Dropped name retains age...expired name loses age?