Hello, I was reviewing some SEO notes I took years ago, when I was learning the SEO trade, and I found mentions about domain age as a ranking factor. I am sure, you have seen those claims too. However, it is not rare to see search engine result pages with newly registered domain names on the first page, often in positions #1 to #3. That said, I want to ask: Does anybody know of any study which shows or proves that claims like... 1. ...old domain names have preference in SEO; or, 2. ...you need to register your domain for longer than a year to show search engines you are serious about your project... ..are true?, or they are just "an urban legend"? Thanks.
With respect to your problem, answers are as follows : 1. Yes Old Domain names do have preference. 2. That saying is true. It affects your rankings and SEO too. So make sure to have a domain booked for long. Though I haven't seen any study that claims this. But, a lot of professionals have said this. If I could find it will share with you.
I think crawling an old domain is faster than new domain but, google preffer website age than domain age..I hope you understand what I mean
Older domains have more trust for google, they are up for a long time, and would possible not go down very fast. It costs google less effort then new domains. (This is just wat i think)
I think the aged domain name is just one of hundreds of ranking factors,Obviously, an old domain would have a big profile link, there have been many links to that domain. If an aged domain but inactive (I mean no website is built on it) is useless although It is even 12 years old! Another insight, If that website has bad link profile, its extremely risky to own the domain.
Guys, thank you for your answers, but I am asking for proof. Do you have any link to any study which proves such claims?
Age of the domain is not a deal here, it's the age of the links to the domain which is important. as for registering domains for longer it's a complete pile of shit... my domains are on auto-renewal and never had a problem because of that.
Not really sure what exactly you would like to say as I don't think the person is asking about crawling speed or loading speed, but the role of aged domain about ranking... Well, for me, it's just something like an experience in the real life when talking about getting a new job. If you KNOW what to do, you can cope with the work excellent. The same with a website, if it's aged and has good ranking, then Google would like to stick with it and often visits it (the Google bot!)
One does not necessarily contradict with the other. We are talking about 1/200 factors here and one that certainly does not hold a significant value. Same as with the recent "Switch to HTTPS hype" not having an SSL does mean your site will suffer significantly. If you are doing things right with your content and links, the domain age and how long it is registered for can only further help. And as those two are also factors of the domain authority (DA) you can be sure that they can only help. As for case studies, I don't believe I've encountered such on this specific subject, but there are a lot of studies that test on expired and dropped domains because of their age and links and it doesn't contradict the theory of usefulness of the domain age. The close you can find are logical assumptions from this video by Matt Cutts: While being vague again Matt never disproves this theory (yeah, he doesn't say it out loud too) but I believe that if you read along the lines he basically states the same thing - while a factor, it doesn't hold too much weight. Further more, and I quote "the difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one year old is really not that big at all" states that while not that big there is indeed a difference. At the end of the day I think that this affects more the brand new websites and as time passes, this factor becomes less and less significant.
1. ...old domain names have preference in SEO; Google needs to find the 'intention' of new domain names (spammy or not for example). Once the trust has been established, older domains have no more benefit than recent ones, assuming the content is the same. 2. ...you need to register your domain for longer than a year to show search engines you are serious about your project... Register it as soon as possible, and then don't use any kind of black hat technique, deliver quality as soon as possible, stay within guidelines. That's the best you can do. If after a year, you don't have good content etc., Google still won't conclude you are serious about your project...
I think you'll have a lot of trouble getting any definitive numbers from people here. I'll say though that one of my older domains had a very small amount of content aging for about 5 years, I started working on that one and about 10 others recently and the older domain has 3x the traffic of all the other similar sites I'm working on. Like others have said, there are so many factors...
I think that is not correct. Why people say old domains get rank well? Google doesn't give importance of a domain age for ranking. On other words it rank well because it might have some backlinks, which the new domain doesn't have. But your second point seems to be correct, but not yet official.
Hi Keteki.. I also would like to add a point in your answer. Today's so many webmasters talk about Domain Authority which can be build through Quality backlinks. So all webmaster must have to look at Quality Backlinks to build Domain and Page Authority.
Here is where I believe you are deeply mistaking. I can show you many, many sources pointing out so, but I am more interested to see where you got the information that the domain age is NOT a ranking factor. If you can share your sources I will be glad to prolong this discussion
The old your domain age the quality and credible your website is. It simply indicates the maturity of a website.
Here are the ranking factors researched by Moz who are among the authority on the subject of SEO and Ranking factors: moz.com/search-ranking-factors They have not mentioned anything about domain age in their research. Domain age may or may not be a ranking factor, but what is confirmed and proved is that domain age is not a significant factor. As long as you have a quality content and you have relevant quality mentions (links), citations (NAP) and good number of social signals (FB, G+, etc); your website has a good chance of ranking well on search engines. The video you posted was really informative, thank you.
Ah yes, then I think we both agree on the same thing, we just had different ways in expressing that. This last post is spot on and I completely agree with it
I'd be interested in this as I am refreshing an old website of 5+ years. It has been up and running but dormant posts.