Impact of domain age

[TheTattooedGuy]

Hi guys

I'm not sure what's more tragic, the fact I am spending my Saturday morning ironing, or that I was thinking about SEO whilst doing it.
Anyway, was wondering what your thoughts were on domain age and how that affects rankings, PR etc.

For example, is there a specific number of months or years that triggers a higher score/ranking? Anyone done any research into this?

Just curious more than anything.

Cheers
Andy

[pokerprop]

Website age makes a noticeable difference. I launched nine 20-30 pages sites with detailed content the past few months, but only 5 are being monitored. Of those five, three of them are on domains that have never had a site on them before and one of them has gotten a lot of natural links. These struggle at the moment with Google traffic it bounces all around, sometimes newly added pages do nothing and take a while to get any traffic at all. Meanwhile the other two used expired domains that had a limited number of backlinks (a few decent ones I presume is from the old owners network) and had a small (3 page for one 8 page for the other) website on them. With these I launched a fresh content site with all new pages (didn't recycle old URLs) and instantly had a few hundred visitors coming in from Google. When I post new content to these sites the pages get picked up and get traffic right away, not the same when I post on the never used the domain before sites. One of these sites has gotten over 3,000 visitors from referral traffic, great conversion, made solid money - but it appears Google is still skeptical of it because it's new.

A side topic in case its not clear - non indexed and registered in 2000 or non indexed and registered in 2011 = same. What shows as the registration for the domain on whois makes no difference in my experience. Except domains that were a site and then got removed from the Google index, or sites with a lot of parked content indexed - these for some reason struggle and fresh registered domains in my experience do better. But never before indexed fresh reg or old reg = same from my experience.

[TheTattooedGuy]

Very helpful post, many thanks

[michael1981]

[QUOTE=pokerprop;137721]Website age makes a noticeable difference.QUOTE]

A new site can rank well if its not targetting competitive keywords, but older sites are so much easier to rank! Its not just domain age, but how long the website has been indexed by Google. An old domain name that has been cached for years is easier to rank, it seems to have more TrustRank

[briandorset]

Great advice, its so hard when your first starting out so many things to take into account.

[Ridge]

Here is Matt Cutts take on domain age.

[casinodave]

Hey if you watch that video, notice he never talks about domain age...only talks about registering for multiple years in advance.

Big difference IMO.

[Michael Martinez]

A different Google employee than Matt Cutts said (earlier this year) in the Google Webmaster Help Forums that after about six months they no longer care about the age of your domain. She did not elaborate beyond that point. I have no more detail to offer than that.

Aside from any possible algorithmic factors related to age, there are intrinsic (or perhaps I should say "intangible") values associated with domain age, although each can be mitigated in one or more ways.

For example, the earliest players in a vertical usually benefit from what is sometimes called the Law of Preferential Attachment, which says that the most well-known or highly visible Websites (or nodes in a network) will be linked to more often than the least well-known or visible sites (or nodes) in a roughly predictable Power Law declining distribution.

For example, older sites tend to have more widespread visibility than younger sites (re: casual mentions, domain name references, etc.) so they are more likely to be perceived (on the basis of the greater number of references) to be more trusted (this is similar to the Law of Preferential Attachment but not quite the same thing).

Statistically speaking, older domains that have seen continual or even sporadic development and buildout of their content have an advantage of reach over new sites, which must always build out from scratch. That is, a 10-year-old site that has been generally active throughout those 10 years is probably relevant to far more queries than any new site that deliberately attempts to compete with it (even if the new site is planned out meticulously down to the last detail).

Another intangible benefit of working with an "old" domain is that you are less likely to feel that you have to push hard for SEO value; hence, you treat it better than a new domain and create better value for it (again, this is similar to but not quite the same as the Law of Preferential Attachment).

There are certain prejudicial beliefs that people attach to domain age which lead those people to make unconscious decisions about trust, quality, and capability concerning those domains which lead to either conflation (degradation) or inflation (enhancement) of the quality of resources used to promote and improve the value of sites.

The more value you think you have to work with, the less likely you're going to do something short-sighted and risky.

The less value you think you have to work with, the more likely you'll feel okay about taking risks.

How many times have you seen someone come charging into a vertical with high risk tactcs, only to switch over to conservative practices once they are established? There is a fundamental psychological explanation for that.

[Ridge]

A new site can rank well if its not targetting competitive keywords, but older sites are so much easier to rank! Its not just domain age, but how long the website has been indexed by Google. An old domain name that has been cached for years is easier to rank, it seems to have more TrustRank

Well, although I know what Prop and you are trying to say, there might be other explanations why his experience is good buying and building older domains. So let's use an experienced webmaster like Prop -


Prop (Jim buying an building out a domain) will see a much quicker return than a new affiliate will see. Even if the newer affiliate picks up a domain that is older but not an established website. I think results can be misleading a little bit when you speak about experienced webmasters in a specific market. Experience has a lot of benefits, one of which is the experienced affiliate has what I call an "internal formula" for building sites and growing sites.

Talking to people over the years, and experiencing it first hand, I am confident that even subconsciously webmasters have their own winning "formula" to building out websites and businesses. The have a specific approach that has been proven to work, even if they don't realize it.

The benefits I see with an older domain is:

It might have some decent backlinks already
Maybe it had a good website on it before, therefore it won't be ding'd with some sandbox type affect.

The cons can be just as big as the pro's IMO, such as:

Maybe it was a low quality website
The website used blackhat / grayhat tactics - Hidden text, auto malware install
The website was used in a different market


So I guess my point is, just because you and I or Jim have had good experiences when finding an older domain and building it out. this doesn't mean it had anything to do with the actual Domain Age.

With all the changes/advances in the ranking signals especially in 2011, I deep down just doubt that the search engineers at google would say:

Hey, is the site was registered over a year, over 2 years, or 5+ years ago, we need to give it a boost!" Because if it's an older domain, then surely its a quality website!

See what I mean? When you think about it, just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And if they were taking domain age as a positive factor, then I think its a serious flaw they need to fix. Again, to me common sense say otherwise.

To clarify, I'm not saying new domains are better than old ones, I'm just saying it usually doesn't mattter. What matters is the level of quality you add to the site once you have it.

[pokerprop]

Alright I've got a new site that has attracted all sort of links, natural ones none of them seeded. It had several posts that have been shared on covers.com, sbrforum.com, casinomeister.com, pocketfives, linked to on other websites, even got a high quality link from a major US newspaper's website, dozen+ tweets a few stumbles, a little digg traffic etc.. This has all happened in the first 2 months. My strong feeling is google hates it LOL or doesn't trust it is the better words.

Site gets 40 to 50 visitors from Google. some visitors decide to mess it up linking it on a forum, soon it gets cross posted, someone shares on another, it gets tweeted and retweeted. Suddenly I had a 0 visitor from Google day followed by days of 1 or 2. Meanwhile I'm getting over 1,000 visitors per day with 30 referral sources from 70+ countries not much if anything happens from google. Several days go by suddenly 40 or 50 visitors from Google again. oops rinse repeat more links show up to another post and it's nuked again.

Another concept here is in the early stages of a site Google is determining what the site is about. Supporting pages start getting mistaken as main topics. You have a website about travel you visit NeverLand one time. You post about it, and then the world goes nuts all writing about it discussing it, saying your photos are the best ever. Before you know it you're ranking for all sorts of NeverLand related terms and oddly so are other pages on your site. Someone searches Neverland Card prices - and suddenly they're on your page about car rents which has nothing to do with Neverland. And your website is called mytravelguide.xxx meanwhile Google now is convinced your site is about Neverland. This is extremely common with newer sites that take off too quick.. and why laying ground work is important in early stages.

Old domain - new domain: either way site needs to age and mature.