I'm battling vs a PR3, 10 year old domain with a PR6, 6 month old domain and I'm losing. I had a similar problem with one of my own websites, but was able to win... however my own site was a few years old compared to the one I'm trying to bring up now. Do any of you have experience with this and know just how long it will take to beat out a domain that old? The site is very small as far as content goes, but it's so goddamn old. I honestly didn't realize the power of age until I witnessed it for myself.
Yes the power of age is tremendous I too learned it the hard way my take, depending on the competition you may have to wait for a few more months only That is why i have started going in for aged and old domains before it gets dropped My experience: I am running a health website 7 months old and it took, 7 months to get to the 15th position that is where it is now. I had acquired a 6 yr old domain few month back, just a month back i added content and optimised it, guess what to my surprise it has already started showing signs of doing well
Hello All, Just to let you know that nowadays its better to have new domains and grow up with fresh content rather than have old domain and put a lot of new content which will get you penalized. Yep that's what happenes when you buy old domain that didn't have freshly updated stuff on it and suddenly from nowhere got all that huge amout of fresh stuff. Think with your heads! Cheers, Venetsian.
If you are going to compete in competitive keywords, you need both domain age and link age. However, before you buy some old domain please check to make sure if that domain hadn't been banned by Google before. There are many domains with a good name and have some old aged but it had been dropped 2-3 times before. When I checked about their history I found some of them has been used to built some junk or back hat sites before. This kind of domain would cause you many troubles.
I don't agree with this at all. As long as the old domain you are buying has never been penalized, it's far superior to starting with a fresh domain. Google may or may not restart the age on it because it changes categories (or something like that), but you won't get penalized. That's totally random.
Ok, just to let you know, that Google checks the registration/expiration/drop dates on the whois and also the names/addresses and even if the registrant changes they assume that its new ownership and drop the link value of some pre-existing links. I don't even want to start that if you change the content of that domain (even keep the same topic) you will get penalized because the "originating" content will be gone. So do you really think old domain is better? Venetsian.
The problem with this theory is that you're assuming Google is only doing things to stop the "bad guys", which isn't the case. There are more legitimate reasons for domains changing content and owners, and if they were to ruin all the legitimate people doing it, they would be doing more bad for their customers than good. If you've experienced what you talk about first hand, I hope you realize there's a hundred other reasons it could have been penalized, or maybe you interpreted something wrong even. I just wouldn't be so sure of yourself when you're in an industry where nothing is certain. There's probably a lot more to what goes on with every aspect than everyone thinks. So again I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but I think it's a case by case decision and that there are far more things that go into the formula than a simple changing of the domain's whois and content.
Registrant change is not important even google buys youtube etc. Domain age is important I'm having (had) the same competiton before , me (2005 regged domain) vs (2000 regged domain). The solution is content built quality content and also backlinks these two is needed , you have to have good content and a slowly growing site.
there doesn't appear to be any consistancy with the answers here, which may suggest that it is not 100% clear how google, yahoo etc really value domain age.