Question: Is Domain Age an SEO Factor or Not?
The simple answer to the Question is: Yes, Domain Age is a Ranking Factor & Google cares about your indexed age.
“Domain age does play a role, but a small role & it’s not a very strong ranking factor as compared to others.
The main Problem associated with buying Old Domains is you have to find out with what it was associated before? Because domains that get Expired may have to be used before for the purposes of Gambling, Spam, Illegal Content, Adult Websites etc.
So, if Search Engine finds out the Profile History of the expired domains, then your Website will never Rank.
We have done a full research & have given practical examples for the Topic which will clear all your doubts.
Is Domain Age really an SEO Factor?
That’s when we decided to write about & let everyone know the Truth.
What is a Domain Age?
Is Domain Age, SEO Factor?
How to find an Old Domain?
Domain Age refers to the Age of the URL(example – www.domain.com) when it was first Registered.
Just to make it clear, here Domain Age means, when was the first time a Search Engine had crawled your Website. It should not be confused with the year a Domain was bought.
So for Example, If a domain is 10 years old, Google will count its age from the day it was first Indexed, not from the Day it was bought.
Is Domain Age an SEO Factor?
Probably Yes, because we have seen that, Google gives a much more preference to Old Aged Domains.
Google cares deeply about the age of both your website and its content.
A brand new site that’s a newcomer to Google is going to have a hard time to rank for any searched keywords in SERPs(Search Engine Results Page) than a website that has Indexed age.
How important is domain age as an SEO factor?
In a Video Uploaded on the Google Webmasters Official Channel, Matt Cutts states that: – we should not bother much about Domain Age, as a Ranking Factor. There are other Factors where you should give more Importance like Content & Link Buildings.
Question: – How does Google determine Domain Age? Do they Look at the whois data or do they Rely on the Crawler? E.g. When it was first indexed. In general, How Important it is for the Website Authority?
They are what we call them as “The Giants of Internet Marketing World”.
Look at the Domain Age of these websites, Most of these domains are already(more than) 10 Years Old.
Now, we can surely say that Major Search Engines see Domain Age as a major ranking factor. Their metrics speaks how much Google Trusts them.
How to Find an Expired Domain?
Ok, you have read the whole Blog & have convinced yourself to buy an Expired Domain. Seems Interesting.
First of All, buying a Great, Spam free, Expired Domain can be really Hard & Time-consuming. So, get ready for it & grab some Coffee.
In general, the best place to buy an Expired Domain is https://www.expireddomains.net & it’s kinda Search Engine where you can find many Expiring Domains.
Now, you’ll see, there can be millions of Deleted Domains, but you need to find the best one, There’s a Filter Option, you can filter domains by type, name, Dmoz Entry etc.
We preferably choose domains with Dmoz Entry because the Spam chances decrease gradually.
After applying the Filter, the list will come down in 1000’s.
We can also sort domains by their Linking Root, a number of backlinks, PageRank, Crawl Test, Availability etc.
We preferably sort by the DP option(linking root domain), because it shows the number of unique domains linking to it.
Choose the best Domain from the list, and check the Link Profile(this is very important), paste it in any of the Site Explorer of your choice.
The very 1st thing to look for in this is Referring Pages for Anchor Phrases(it shows anchor text distribution from the backlinks), it should have Natural Link Profile.
Paste the URL & you will get the Registrar Information, & also how many times the domain was dropped.
If it looks good, buy that Domain.
We are going, to be honest with you, whenever we do competitor research for any of the Client, we always wondered why Google places Old Aged Domain higher in their Rankings?
If you still want to take a chance, make sure that you are very good at it, or else, you have to face the consequences from Search Engines.
Let us know in the comments if you have faced any issue in figuring out Domain Age as an SEO Factor, and what was your conclusion on the same.
In this section we will give you live updates(with examples) of our current rankings. We will also show you what worked for us & what did not.
So, for the Keyword: “domain age seo factor”, our current page is ranking on the 19th(2nd page) position of the SERP. We are outranking other websites which have more Links & better index age than us. Now, we know 19th is not a great position, but it has improved. The positions are fluctuating, but its not cracking on to the 1st Page. The best position we acquired was 13th.
Remember, We have not built a single link yet & as everyone knows this is a new domain the Domain Authority(DA) & Page Authority(PA) is 1.
Ranking on the 1st page are some posts written back in 2008/2010. This is solely because of the trust they have built overtime in the eyes of Google.