I have someone interested in a nine letter .com keyword domain I first registered in Sept. 2001. The first wayback machine indexing shows Dec. 2002. I have a placeholder site published, which has no PR, but comes up #5 on Google for the keyword. It's a VERY niche term I seldom sell domains, but know these old domains are attractive in efforts to avoid the sandbox. I would like to hear from domain buyers who have an idea of what sort of premium the age might add to the value. Thanks,
As soon as you sell the domain, the domain can be subject to the sandbox. Google grandfathered older domain names from the sandbox as long as there is no ownership change. This was originally done to prevent sex and other problem type sites from just buying older domain names to avoid the sandbox. I found this out the hard way when I changed the registar information on a domain I had owned since 1999. I put the domain in a business name and changed the address since I had been using my home address. The city was the same, but it looked like the domain had changed hands and I got sandboxed for terms I had been ranking in the top 10 for. The site was not developed, but did have a PR5 home page with content on the page and a contact, resources page, etc. If it had been a fully developed domain, I don't believe it would have been sandboxed. Developed sites are not usually subject to the sandbox upon sale - at least as long as the theme of the site doesn't change. I've seen similar aged domains selling for under $50, so the real value of the domain really depends on the actual domain name/and or the keyword(s) it is ranking for. If you don't want to disclose the name, you could probably get a estimate based on how many times the keyword (without quotes) is searched for each month (check overture) and what the top couple of bids show for the keyword. Another factor would be if the domain name has any possible trademark infringement issues.