Website Age: A Major Ranking Factor?

Hey everyone!

So I'm building a site in a niche with moderate-low competition. There are no major websites on the front page... all just blogs. The size of these blogs is nothing major as well (100-600 indexed pages). There are a few youtube videos on the 1st page and the TF/CF for each site/page is nothing too significant <30 for both.

However, the ages of all these sites and videos are around 10 years old! Is this something that could be the determining factor of whether I hit 1st page or not?

I know there are TONS of factors that contribute to rankings, but would you suspect these domain ages would make it hard for me to rank say in 6-12 months?


Cheers,
Ryan

Short answer: No.

More elaborated answer: Ranking takes numbers factors under advisement and while age is one of them, it's certainly not the most important. If anything, right now content is still king. If the other site that are ranking aren't consistently posting new content and you, while also indexing new backlinks and you are, you will out rank them 9/10. Just keep it consistent. Good luck mate.

Great! Thanks for the response man. Yeah, it looks like the sites aren't too active anymore which is a great sign. There are plenty of factors that I can get working in my favor, just wanted to make sure the age thing 'is most likely' not going to be an end-all-be-all sort of thing.

Thanks again!

Aged domain play a big role in ranking if you put quality and optimized content. If your age domain have 15 Trust flow you can rank your low competitive keyword with only HQ content. Thats why i always choose expired domain.

PHPInjected said:

Ranking takes numbers factors under advisement and while age is one of them, it's certainly not the most important.

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That's right, same opinion here.

I might add that you might be able to rank on the first page for some keywords that your competition neglected.

Few months back I ranked a 3 months old blog on the first page for a long tail keyword. The niche was Finance.

According to this research carried out by ahrefs age is a reasonable important factor.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/on-page-seo/

Just search for the heading "age of the page".

Looks like <2% of sites ranking in first place across 2M keywords were less than 1 year old.

davids355 said:

Looks like <2% of sites ranking in first place across 2M keywords were less than 1 year old.

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thanks, great info

Aged domains with aged backlinks in the same niche would definitely make a difference.

I tried targeting the same KW with 2 different websites. The first one which is almost 2 years old is ranking at around 10th place. The other one which is 3 months old and with even better content is hardly ranking 100th place. Regards.

davids355 said:

According to this research carried out by ahrefs age is a reasonable important factor.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/on-page-seo/

Just search for the heading "age of the page".

Looks like <2% of sites ranking in first place across 2M keywords were less than 1 year old.

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Didn't read it but from that last statement there's too many things wrong with that.
a) Probably a very small percentage sites are less than a year old.
b) A large number of sites that are less than a year old are more than likely spam and garbage or some mom trying 'work from home'.
c) Obviously sites that are aged have a head start on link building and are more than likely going to have more and better backlinks than a site that's six months old.

That being said I feel age is a big, not massive factor in ranking. And it makes sense. Google wants authority sites up top. The chances of a site that's six months old being an authority or becoming an authority are slim. Where as one that's been around for 5+ years has obviously been around that long for some reason or other.

I got into a niche and found a EMD from the late 1990s. I bought it for a nice chunk and the fact that it's EMD and aged definitely helped my rankings. I blew away the competition with a fraction of their links, and I rank right up there with Amazon, Home Depot, etc etc.

creativeshuvo said:

Aged domain play a big role in ranking if you put quality and optimized content. If your age domain have 15 Trust flow you can rank your low competitive keyword with only HQ content. Thats why i always choose expired domain.

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Buying an expired domain is the same as buying a new domain, the only difference is you may have some back links already, but the registrar will show that the domain has expired and been re registered.

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback, there is a lot here for me to think about!

Basically, there are 3 different options I am considering...

1. Build money site off of an aged domain
2. Buy an aged domain and 301 redirect it to my money site
3. Build a PBN with strong, aged domains in my niche (I'll do this regardless)

What are your thoughts on these options?

rdm5613 said:

Thanks to everyone for the great feedback, there is a lot here for me to think about!

Basically, there are 3 different options I am considering...

1. Build money site off of an aged domain
2. Buy an aged domain and 301 redirect it to my money site
3. Build a PBN with strong, aged domains in my niche (I'll do this regardless)

What are your thoughts on these options?

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Depends what you want to do. All three will be fine.
1. I bought and developed an aged domain (as mentioned earlier)
2. I just bought an expired (not aged) and 301ing it to a new money site. This site I'm not too worried if somethign happens to it. My main money site I would not do this.
3. Aged domain won't matter much in this, the metrics would be more important. But a PBN with aged domains will have less red flags than one with all new domains.

Yep, old domain will earn a greater level of trust from Google than a 6-month old domain. However, domain age really carries only a little weight in Google's algorithm. There are many factors that are far more important for your site to rank well on Google SERP such as posting only high-quality content, External backlinks of your content and the quantity of your content. Providing good quality content for your visitors that will answer their questions and will provide their needs, the higher the chance that your visitors will like it, share it with others and bookmark it. This way, you can naturally generate quality incoming links. This will bring positive results to your page ranking.