I just recently bought a 3 year old domain as I heard that aged domains are not subject to the sandbox effect. My question is if I tranfer the domain from Godaddy to my current hosting provider as the registrar will the domain loose its status as an aged domain and fall subject to the Google sandbox or will it still have its aged status since the domain has never expired.
If you keep the old content, perhaps developing the site further, I don't see why the age should be lost. But I have no experience with this.
Nope, infact when you transfer domain from one registrator to other your domain recieve one year renewal.. Saad
the domain will still keep it's age regardless how many times it's expired/bought/transfered The one thing to watch out for is making sure that the domain hasn't been red-flagged or something similar
Are you sure about that? If you let a domain expire and register it after it is released in the namepool, the new registration date is shown as the Creation Date of the domain.
If the domain has not been hosted their is no age in Googles eyes and as far as I know none of the other search engines really care. A site has to be hosted not just registered. Use the wayback machine to check a sites history.
I'm very sure, spammers do it a lot. When a domain expires, you pick it up for peanuts, usually has good age, PR and backlinks behind it. Spammers paradise
Changing whois details of a domain name can put the site in sandbox. The domain will not be sandboxed unless you change the whois details no matter how many times you transfer it to different registrars. I doubt, Changing whois details of the domain can put the site in sandbox.
sandbox... I have never ever been hit by the sand box I'm proud to say which makes me doubt it's existence. Plus anyway the sandbox is more for 'young' sites (get it, young un's get to play in the sandbox until there 'old' enough to cope) not really for anything else
Your right it is only for new sites. And I have not had trouble with it either. It is IMO very good at catching spam and if you have a good site you can stay away from it.
Well, while you guys visio and Dudibob have the right to disagree, I certainly believe that sandbox effect can be triggered when the whois details of a domain name are changed. Google wouldn't have become an ICCAN registrar if it does not want to use whois data to improve its search results IMO
Change one thing at a time. If you change whois, content, host and registrar all at the same time its going to look like its sold.
you're right that it's possible, but it's not happening currently, and I know that from personal experience. expired domains are one thing-- avoid them. transfered domains are something else entirely. I agree that those that want to be conservative about it all should do that. however, I haven't had any problem with doing that and logically there's no reason for google to punish that (not that that guarantees anything-- google does a lot of things that don't make sense). sites change hands all the time for legitimate reasons. when you buy an existing site for revenue, etc, do you expect the ratings to tank? does google have an incentive for punishing sites for doing that?
In Feb. of 2005 I changed the ownership of an old established site from my personal name to my company name. I didn't make any changes to the site itself. Over the next few months the adsense income dropped by about 1/3 and then gradually recovered. It did not do that in 2006 so I doubt the drop was a seasonal effect. This proves nothing, and things may have changed since then, but I am now extremely reluctant to change whois info
No no I agree with you to an extent. Not sure if I made a post that insinuated otherwise or not. If a site is dropped and re-registered it is considered new to google and can be sandboxed again however if it is a site being trasnferred to new hosting no change will be made in domain length. Just remember domains that are not hosted have no age in googles eyes. they only gain age when they are being hosted.