Hi Guys, I was wondering how important is domain age. Say I have a domain from 1993 and want to start to seo for it does it carry weight wtih google? i know having extra years before your domain is up for renewal has no benefit as confirmed by Matt Cutts.
It depends. Have you had an active site with that domain since 1993? If you've just had the domain without any content then it's not going to matter much but if that site's been up and running fore several years then that can definitely help. For example one of my domains was ranked 3rd forever and recently it's now ranked #1. This can also be attributed to having more backlinks over time.
Yes as a general rule older domains are more trusted by google and thus have a tendency to do better in search engine listings vs their younger counterparts of equivalent seo level.
Actually the domain was owned by a couple other people before me and now i own it. There were periods where there was no content on the site (down); however, it has quite a bit of backlinks (guessing they're aged) of the domain name it self.
In my opinion it's more about your domain history rather than your domain age. If that domain has a history of being parked for 2 decades then it'll probably do you no good in terms of SEO. But assuming it was a popular site (and you have similar content as the previous owners) then you can probably benefit from the older domain.
In my experience of nursing a few domains from newborns to a couple of years old, ranking seems to improve in jumps at about 6 months and 1 year old unless your backlinks are really good. If you have good, relevant links you can shortcut the process of SERPs improvement.
Domain age is important, but not all the time. It can only beneficial to a site if it already has good quality BLs. Otherwise it's not that useful compared to a new domain. It always depends on how trust worthy the domain is.
mrandrei, how do you tell how trustworthy a domain is? I know seo moz's links scape has a metric for each domain. Do you mean that?
Google loves aged domain than new domain simply because they trust it more than new domains, new domains will more than likely harbor spammer and scammer sites than aged domains