I heard recently that Google "resets" a domains age when the domain is transferred to another owner. I'm referring to the value G assigns to the age of the domain in calculating its position in the serps. I'm not talking about expiring domains. I personally don't think that makes sense for G to do that. What do you think? I understand resets for expirations and major topic swaps, but not a simple ownership transfer. I'm sure this must have been asked before, but I couldn't find it with forum search.
I wouldn't trust opinions I can't verify -and assuming such a thing exists, google does not disclose any kind of "domain age rank". What I can verify and check is page rank and serps. My personal experience, having done several ownership transfers, has been that neither PR nor SERP results were changed.
total non sense, just use your common sense.. it's really silly to think that google would drop all the authority/trust and reset the age factor each time that a website is sold.
Yeah that's total nonsense, Google doesn't care about age, Matt Cutts talked about this in one of his videos. The reason older domains seem to out rank newer ones is because they have more aged links.
As a worst case scenario, Google might take the initial registration date of the domain name - which is not reset after a transfer of ownership. Imagine the furore if a party purchased a business that enjoyed excellent sales from Google Serps and then that traffic disappeared because of the business sale transfer? Nope, it can't make a difference, it wouldn't make sense. However, a domain expiring and being released then being re-registered may be a completely different matter.
As long as a domain is not _dropped_, it will retain its rankings even when its ownership is transferred... I am sure of this.
Do you know which one of his videos he covers this in? If you have a link, that would be great, would like to hear his comments first hand
Precisely. The domain age is not about ownership, but about the actually time that the domain has been alive. (registered)
dont suppose that happens. further it is validated not only for other forum users comments but also from google forusm itself.
age is age. If you move to a new country is your age reset...no. Domain age is based on initial registration date. IF a domain expires and sits long enough before being registered again this "could" reset age.
If we all (most) agree that google give preference to domain age how about the age of our backlinks? Do older links provide more kudos with Google?
Agreed. If a domain drops it goes dormant for a couple weeks while the old owners grace period expires and the domain name is made available for registration again. This leaves the site down for at least a couple of weeks and that will kill any site's ranking, but a smooth transfer of ownership or even a hosting change won't hurt you one bit (provided your new site has on-page optimization as good as or better than the old site and you don't change the page names in such a way that you kill the old site's backlinks).