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

Has the same happened to your "private" version of the experiment?

 

I think also the duplicate issue may cause some issues, suggestion would be to move alter the sites a tiny bit so they still target the keywords but more or less. I am guessing the difference will be big between the old and young domain so some minor differences in the site for keywords should not alter anything.

 

I think someone from Google is reading this thread and just messing around

 

Aha, that makes sense. It could be a semantic issue re: their public statements that they don't take age into account. It could be that they mean they don't give a "bonus" for it directly, but it could still play an indirect role via some of the factors you mention. Plus there's no telling whether "inception date" means domain reg date, or the date they first find "good" content there. I tend to suspect the latter. People routinely sit on domains for years - you have to figure that Google is smart enough to know this, and also know that such domains have no intrinsic value beyond brand new names.

The trouble is that because most of these are indirect factors, you're rolling the dice with an aged name if you don't know its whole history. If age alone isn't a bonus, but rather a parameter for other bonuses (or potential detriments), then any one result is plainly inconclusive unless you can con trol for all those other variables.

Re: your test, I'd also be skeptical about the indexing issue. Speed of indexing has little to do with long-term performance, after all, and an aged domain is likely to already be in their database - if it gets re-indexed faster than a new domain gets indexed for the first time I'd say that doesn't prove anything about overall performance. I'm more interested in how they perform 2-3 months from now, or whenever both sites are fully cached.

Despite all this, I'll say thanks again for doing real world tests and sharing the results. The more info we have, the better.

 

Perhaps Google thinks that both domains are pointing to the same website... both domains resolve to the same IP address and have the same content. Therefore it'll just eliminate one of the domains (age would be a good criteria, as would importance) so their SERPs are less clogged. If there are multiple domain names pointing to the same website, then it would make sense to treat all those domains as a single entity (because they are).

2- I think what some people are interested is in whether the age of the linking site and the age of the link matters. This test might not be testing for that.

 

To answer you question: no, age doesn't matter if you cover you tracks. I got a brand new website competing for top phrases in programming search terms (3.6 million results) within a few days. And it stuck there, and is now giving me a great amount of traffic.

Age is nothing if you know what you're doing.

 

1. Age helps out ...and saves you a lot of time. Nobody is stating that you can't get good results with a new domain....the point is that an old domain has a much better advantage.
2. I doubt anyone can capture a 'competitive' term with a new domain in a short period of time. 3.6 million results doesn't mean the term is competitive...you need to compare the amount of searches per month to see. Nevertheless, nothing is impossible.

 

I just checked adwords, and the competitive ranking is a little above average. Still impressive I would say.

Average search volume is 60,500 per month. I am ranked #3-#6 on a consistent basis since I created the page.

 

those that are 1-3.. what are their ages?

 

age matters , but not that much , i have made a number of websites over the period of last year or so , and all the new websites , with 3 , 4 months of work generate a PR 5 or PR 4 for sure ..... so i guess it holds very low siginificance .......

 

PR is nothing when it comes to SERPs

 

All three are highly reputed programming resources, so I doubt I'll be crossing them anytime soon.

1. 1997 (Over 10 years)
2. 2003 (around 5 years)
3. 2000 (Around 8 years)
4. Me- 2008 (<1 years)

Seems to be shoddy correlation.

 

check out the backlinks for each..and look at the tags.

Usually, you will find that the top 3 doesn't have as many backlinks, and their tags (title/description) aren't at par.

 

1 - 45,000 links
2 - 267 links
3 - 3,000 links
me - no indexed links with link: command

 

I did something similar and the .com seems to win over the .net, though this should not be relevant. When I did it, the .net was the older one but not by much.

 

so zac439, probably you won the rankings because of good website
structure and enough subpages with subthemes.
how many subpages to you have?

 

Subpages: 3

get a new theory!

 

ok, my new theory then:

this time you simply had luck

 

Sweetfunny, how is your experiment doing? Please, keep us posted.

 

Search engines believes that Old is Gold, and the results are also follow this formula. Domain age is a factor for boost the keyword into serp.