Does domain age really make a difference?

The age of a domain is believed by some to be an important factor in rankings, while others dismiss it as either having a relatively minor role, or not important at all. In the following blog post, we will discuss this topic further. Our aim is to hopefully shed some light on the matter by analysing some data we gathered from the search results of several chosen keywords.

The general consensus is that domain age is a factor in the ranking algorithm, with many businesses looking out for old domains to purchase and take over. There are some other reasons why old domains are bought:

For link equity: Old domains are sometimes bought to pass on link equity (or link juice) to a money site. Pages from sites that have built up trust and rated by search engines are sought after and 301 redirected to another site to boost the other site’s strength. However, it’s not recommended that an old domain be redirected for link equity if the domain is not related to the market you are in.

Buy out competition: Sometimes it may be easier for certain markets to purchase a competitor’s domain than trying to outrank them, particularly if the competitor is rated higher or has more backlinks.

For the domain name: It may simply be that the domain in question is more suited to a certain business market, or contains a keyword particular to a niche area that businesses want to target.

Domain age is regarded as important for search engine optimisation as spammers are known for dropping and registering domains regularly, therefore not establishing themselves to a domain that has built up trust over the years. Also, well established sites have old domains and, in a roundabout way, an old domain tends to mean that the site is well established (but this is not always the case).

We decided to undertake a simple study of several randomly chosen keywords to see whether or not there is a visible difference in domain age in the search results. The top 20 results were taken from four keyword phrases; “lawn mowers”, “pressure washers”, “ramen noodles” and “thai rice”. We separated the first page results (position 1 to 10) from the second page results (11 to 20) to find a correlation to the fact that domain age contributes to rankings.

Lawn Mowers

Pressure Washers

Ramen Noodles

Thai Rice

As you can see from the above graphs, on three out of the four phrases the websites in positions 1-10 had a higher average domain age. In one case, however, for “Thai Rice”, the websites in positions 11-20 actually averaged higher domain ages. To continue the study further we looked into two other phrases; “garden equipment” and “sushi”. Our findings were in correlation with the findings here, as both of them ranked higher for the domain ages in positions 1-10.

If we were to make this study larger in scale we would expect to see similar results, with only one in six cases showing results that counter our theory. It can be argued then that while domain age is seen as important, it is not always a major factor in search engine rankings.

Below are some tools for checking domain ages, plugins and some useful resources where you can see what age your site is, or, in fact any site you wish to see.

Tools for checking domain age

Netcraft for Firefox is a useful plugin for this and will give you additional information such as hosting location, popularity and includes their own risk rating for each site visited.

Seologs.com provides a domain age checking service which will give you a more precise date in years, months and days, should you want to find out a more precise date.

Type into Google “info:yoursite.com” to obtain some invaluable information on a domain which you can use to decide whether a domain is reputable or not. You can see Google’s cached version of the site’s pages, webpages that link to the domain (backlinks) as well as webpages that the domain links to, and also a list of sites that mention the domain in question.

Conclusion

Google does include the age of a domain in the ranking factor, but as they do not consider the date of which a domain is registered to be a sign of a site’s trustworthiness or quality, it is only a small factor, one of over 200 ranking signals. This is due to the fact that domains are often bought and parked, which is when domains are registered but not used for a long period of time. Another reason is that a domain may have been used for questionable purposes and then sold onto a legitimate company without the initial registration date being changed when passed over.

We also found that where competing sites were evenly matched across a variety of factors, domain age did actually come into account. On a larger scale investigation we would expect this to be proved true.

To conclude on the topic of domain age, there are several facts to consider. The website age along with the domain age will be Google’s deciding factor of a site’s authority in the rankings. One of the reasons why older domains are important is due to the number of backlinks that have been built over the years, with each link viewed as a vote of confidence towards the site. Finally, remember that domain age is only one of over 200 ranking signals in Google’s ranking algorithm, so it is important to ensure not too much emphasis is placed on this sole ranking factor.

Authors:

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

Rob Bromilow
SEO Programmer, SMO and Hosting Contact