I have acquired an 8 year old domain name that contains a 2 word phrase for what I would consider to be a very competitive niche. The phrase shows 280 million Google results and Overture shows 31,000 searches per day for the phrase. The domain name isn't a perfect match for the phrase, there is one (3 letter) word to the left of the actual phrase in the domain name. I don't think the domain has ever been developed, archive.org shows a simple 'under construction' page for its entire history. My question is; All other things being equal, what sort of advantage does the age of the domain give me for search engine results? Mark
This should help you (and others too) ~~~~~~~~~~~~ "This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization... ...The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below..." SEO Wisdom Link
Aged domain is certainly useful but nobody can confirm the exact benefit in terms of SERP computation. I have bought a banned aged domain and it ranked on the first page after some basic article submission and one reinclusion request
Thank you very much gemini181 for the link to an excellent resource. It will take me a while to digest all the information, but I am sure it will help me to obtain better results. It seems that domain age is not as important as I imagined, but could still give some advantage for a competitive phrase. Thanks again for the link. Mark
I don't think this domain has ever been banned, it would be fairly difficult for it to have been banned with only an 'under construction' page. After quickly skimming the article that gemini181 linked, it would appear that the fact that the domain has never been developed could be a bad thing. It seems that Google judges the age of a site by the first appearance of content, not the registration date. Mark
That's how I've always understood 'aged' as well: a domain that has had actual content for eight years - not a domain that someone has had 'under construction' for eight years. In fact, it can probably count against you: google has 8 years of history to show that the owner never bothered to do anything with it. Why would they crawl (let alone index) that site now? In short: if you're still only considering buying this domain - don't buy it just because it has a keyword in there you'd like to rank for. There are probably better options out there.
Considering what's been mentioned above, I wouldn't pay much for it. In other words, if it's cheap & might be worth experimenting with.
Thanks for the comments guys, they are much appreciated. I actually already own the domain, I bought it relatively cheaply a few months ago. The main reason I am asking the question is that I am considering building a site for that particular niche and I have to decide whether to use this domain, or perhaps register an entirely new domain. Although, all the good domain names containing the phrase I am interested in are already taken. I don't think it will be particularly hard to get Google to index the site, as when I first obtained the domain I added it to the hosting system of my host and the (empty) Apache directory listing was in the Google index in less than a week. So I guess there must be a link or two out there pointing to the domain. Mark
Google prioritize the age of the domain rather than the new domain...It is helpful in regards to SE ranking... But I don't why Google prefer ranking first the old domains rather than the new...
Do check on the links to the domain. If it's as good as any other domain in your niche that's still available, I guess I'd go for it. If pages on there are already indexed - and were indexed pretty quickly - that's your answer right there: the domain does not seem to have a penalty of any sort.