Does Domain Age Really Matter? ->Experiment Inside<-

Your corrected, domain extensions do not get any special value over another, meaning a *.gov has the same standard value as a *.com or even a *.info, the issue with *.gov and *.edu links being highly valued is because they tend to have massive amounts of quality backlinks; but the factor has nothing to do with the actual domain extension. Only cc-TLD can rank better in their respect geo-graphical area, but again can still be out ranked by their *.com counter part.

 

Day 9

The .net domain is still not indexed, and now the aged domain Italindex.com is coming up first spot when searching for Italindex.net despite that exact term not appearing on the page.

* The .com is indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* The .net is not indexed in the main 3 engines
* The .com has had 9 hits from Yahoo and 4 hits from Google
* The .net has had 11 hits from Yahoo and 4 hits from Google

So despite all things being equal, all three engines are showing preference to the aged domain in the SERP's.

 

thanks for the results. i'm curious, it looks like Italindex .com & .net is being hosted on the same hosting account and IP address. i wonder if it would help the newer domain name if it was hosted on a separate IP address.

i've said in another thread that my 9 year old aged domain i resurrected after it's lost hosting 2 years ago benefitted from age and now is ranked 26 (from 150 last month). i'm thinking of trying a similar experiment with a .WS that's 8yrs old & never used vs. a brand new .TV domain with the same name. not sure though 'cause the .TV would cost me $26.98 pre-coupon at godaddy.

 

but

how is that possible? getting visitors from SEs although not being indexed?
I think that is not possible.

 

Of course it's possible, just because a bot hits a page doesn't mean it's in the index. I've got a site that's had over 250,000 hits from Google but it has 65,000 pages and only 50,000 are currently indexed.

 

I have gotten hits from Google that say 'google' but really came from a referral link.

The referral link was ranking much higher in Google.

If you go to webmaster tools..you may see some keywords that you WILL not see your domain in the top 10. You should see one of your referral links though...

 

ok, the pages which are indexed would of course be found on google and only these
would get the traffic from SEs. the remaining unindexed pages would not get direct traffic
(not referral) from SEs. I think thats right, isnt it? Otherwise I would not understand the sense
of indexing.

 

bot hits..not visitors from Google

 

ok, bot hits, thats something different, but thats what you always wanted to tell me, right

anyway, I have a question related to expired domains.
what if we buy an expired domain which was registered 5 years ago.
if we re-register it would this mean that this domain is still 5 years old
or will it be regarded as a new born one?

 

he was referring to bot hits....I wasn't in my earlier post.

---will still mean it's 5yrs old.

 

Evidence, please? I've never seen a single shred of evidence of this beyond anecdotal claims. Further, Google explicitly denies taking domain age into account, and always has.

At least the OP is attempting to test the assertion under real-world conditions. The trouble is, one result will hardly be conclusive, no matter how it turns. out. Too many other variables.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens.

 

Interesting test, but with so little content on the page, google may feel the page is not important enough to index and rank.

 

Well not quite true, Google's patent titled Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data does mention things such as Inception Date, Historical Changes over Time, Expiration data and numerous other age based signals for scoring documents. Rand does an excellent write up of it here: Historical Data Patent.

Now, Google doesn't always use patent data sometimes they register it to throw a curve ball but mostly to secure the technology to prevent the competition from using and obtaining a patent on it. So anything in their patents should be taken with a grain of salt until proven or disproven.

Thanks, and yes i do try and test everything i say or at least have evidence to support it. With the domain age test, i've done one before plus i'm doing another private test in conjunction with this public one in case someone corrupts the data.

So far it's looking like aged domain 3, new domain 0.

As for this experiment, the new domain still isn't cached or indexed and the .com went from PR N/A to PR0.

The .com has the same amount of content as the .net yet the .com was cached in just 9 hours. So if it didn't have enough content, the .com would never of been indexed either.

 

Great idea for an experiment, looking forward to the results. **Bookmarked.

 

Update:

Something very odd has happened with the experiment. The new domain Italindex.net still cannot be found in Google, and searching it brings up Italindex.com in #1

Now get this, doing a cache check on the .net is showing the .com despite these domains never having any form of redirect to each other.

See here.

Both domains are showing PR0 after the update instead of the gray bar despite the .net never being in Google's index.

Interesting no?

Even i don't fully know what to make of it, is Google doing an "implied" redirect due to them having the same URL and content? That's my best guess for now.

 

I'm was think the same thing; is appears Google has picked one of the sites to be displayed due to the same content and same URL structure minus the extension. This might be a way to prevent spam, to prevent people from registering a domain of an existing site with a different extension and just scrapping it. In theory, this experiment might work better under the following conditions.

1. 2 completely different URLs with no relevance to the keyword being tested.
2. Different content, however playing keywords exactly in the same place in the content and using identical heading tags. (This still might effect the experiment).
3. Build backlinks from different sources completely, no identical backlinks but of the same nature. (Again, this still might effect the experiment

Just my 2 cents buddy, great work never the less! +REP

 

If there is dublicate content on two sites google generally sees the older site trustworthy.
On one of my sites some one has copied my title and description on an older domain and my site goes up to forth and down to nowhere periodically.

 

Yeah it's like Google have taken it upon themselves to internally redirect the .net to the .com which is interesting.

I could try some other tests using domains with different keywords to each other, and also switch it around so the .net is the oldest because i have a ton of old domains.

As for different content, that's a hard one to measure the question of "Does domain age really matter" because Google doesn't just see keywords it sees the actual context of the page. So even keeping keywords in the same locations on the two domains and filling the rest with unique content will skew the results so they can't really be measured because the pages will have different overall relevancy scores for the test keywords.

It's a hard one to test properly without throwing guesswork in to the results.

I guess i could slowly tweak the content on the .net domain and make it more and more unique over time and see at what point of uniqueness Google drops the .com cache and ads the correct cache for the domain. This may give us an indication of the unique/duplicate threshold for content.

What do you think?

 

Great idea, I wish I had a domain name with 10 years to its name... can't wait to see how this turns out.

 

I don't think you'll be able to come up with a 100% answer to the actual question at hand; as you stated there are so many factors in determining SERPs it's almost impossible to run this expirement and achieve results properly. Overall, the data is still useful, but if will you get a for sure answer is another question all together. I personally don't believe domain age plays "much" of a factor, it has some relevancy to SERPs I'm sure but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts it's only another wire in an entire engine.

Is the controlled non-public aspect of this expirement showing the same results and actions?