It's clearly a factor. See the SEOMoz survey of 300 leading SEOs. They put domain age as one of the top ten factors influencing search position.
we are actually going to test this out shortly. we have a client who have a site up on a 3 year old domain that also just happen to have a nine year old domain up of more or less the same name. we're going to put the site up on the 10 year old domain and 301 the 3 year old one there. will rankings get better? we think probably, but we'll see. I dont actually think its very high weighting at all, maybe 5% if that. decent links and sharp onsite win everytime
I have two domains that I registered in 1996. The first website is about the semiconductor industry and I began the website in 1996. Today, I still rank higher than most major billion-dollar semiconductor companies that registered their domains ten years ago - I rank #1 and they always rank #2. Some are pretty annoyed about it. My domain name has been estimated to be worth at least $500,000. The second domain that I registered in 1996, I only started a website with it in 2003. It ranks very high whenever I target a keyword (related to the domain name). It's in sports, which is a highly competitive niche. Domain age is very important. After years of testing, I've come to the conclusion that if you have a very old domain name, you don't need inbound links. I beat the pants off of websites with loads of inbound links. But, keep in mind, my domains were registered in 1996 so it's an unfair example.
Domain age is very important and has a great influence on your search engine traffic. That is why i register my domains in advance and keep a little website, to get at least one year age.
Earlier Search engine was giving bit worth to the old domain. But now days the trend has been changed and giving equal importance to the new domain as well. As per SE fresh domain has fresh content and we all know how important content is.
I haven't seen any evidence of this at all. Even Google admits they give more weight to old domains. Can you show us anything to back up your claim?
Domain age makes a massive difference and is the reason you see so many site ranking high that seem to have no seo employed on them. They have no inbound links, non-keyword urls, titles that are poor and haven't been updated for ages. It will takes lots of links to pass these sites but as time passes they won't be 10 older than you anymore!
Domain's age is of importantance because the older the domain the higher it's chances of being established in Google's eyes. Even though there are scenarios where this might not be true but in most cases it is. A domain from 2006 doesn't probably have that much value but its still far better than a new domain.
I think a domain can tick over to PR3 after 5 years without any inbound links. It gets credibility for surviving!
Domain age does indeed have an effect. Almost to the day when my site hit 1 year old I saw an increase in my SERPs. When I initially started the site last year I had my products on Google Base so didn't spend much time on SEO and concentrated on conversions. BIG MISTAKE. Once my products got removed from Google Base for some unsaid policy violation my traffic died. So I had to hustle to try and build organic traffic. I had a hard time getting any good movement until I reached 1 year old. Now I am finding I can concentrate on a phrase and have it effected with just a meta description change in about 24 hours. Google is also on my site nearly 24/7 since I hit 1 year old. I have about 150,000 pages with all of the products.
There is no doubt that older domains are better than newer ones. But don't go out there buying any old domain you find. Some domains have been blacklisted by Google.
As far as what I've seen/tested a new domain (less than a year) is much harder to rank (in competitive markets) than a 2+ year domain. At the same time a domain that has been live for 2+ years will have exactly the same ranking capabilities as a 10 years old domain. So yes domain age is relevant but after a couple of years you have the same "age relevance" as anybody else. The only difference is the link building efforts and size. A domain that has been SEOd for 10 years already has a 10 year head start in building links and content.
domain age gives much advantage and reputation to the website compare with newly created domains, that's why these kind of websites are well established.
Site age is important, Google's algorhythm is all about site authority, so an older site is considered more authoratative, but it is just one factor of many. The 15% guess sounds reasonable to me.
giorgioarmani I agree with you domain age is really matters as the domain is old and continuously providing service will defiantly have some weight in search algorithms.
Aaron Wall explain it well in his SEO book. but i m still unable to calculate the individual factor of domain weight that had been considered by Google for its algorithm.