Does Domain Age Matter
There seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to Google using domain age as a factor in their ranking algorithm. Although only Google knows for sure, various experts on the web have done some experiments, and I’ve got some experience myself trying to get new domains ranked versus old domain.
From my research and own expermients, I’ve developed a few speculations that I use for guidelines when it comes to domains and domain age.
But first, I want to touch on the the perception of the ‘sandbox’. Personally, I don’t think the sandbox exists. It’s simply the perception of web owners of the way Google’s ranking algorithm works. You launch a new site, a few weeks later it shows up pretty well ranked in the search results, and then a few days after that it disappears…. Oh no! I’ve been sandboxed!
Well, not exactely. Google tends to give a rankings boost to new content (and this boost is even more pronounced with the new Caffeine update). That’s because the content is, well, new. So it gets a good ranking for a time and Google watches to see what happens. After that initial boost, it usually disappears off the top results while Google starts to incorporate other factors of it’s algorithm. The amount of time it takes to get back on top is influenced by its performance when it was highly ranked, i.e. did it generate some backlinks?
But we’re here to talk about domain age, not the ‘sandbox’.
This means that as far as domain age goes, it just isn’t a a factor – or at least not one that has much influence – when it comes to ranking. But the perception is that it does becuase in order for links to age, the domain has to age as well. But there’s no easy tool for determining link age, so people look at domain age instead.
Consider: in order for a link to be 3 years old, the site it’s on has to be at least 3 years old and the site it goes to must be at least 3 years old. This combination of factors with contribute to greater authority (and potentially a better ranking) for that destination site than for a new site. In order for a link to be 3 years old, the site it’s on has to be 3 years ld, and that’s how the idea of domain age being a factor got started.
If you buy a 5 year old domain that’s never been developed and has no inbound links, you are essentially starting with a brand new domain. What you want is a 5 year old domain with some aged inbound links, the older the better. So while the age of YOUR domain doesn’t matter, the age of the domain that links to you does.
It’s all in the links:
- Authority of the site they are from (in which age does play a factor)
- How old the link is
The challenge issue here is that there’s no easy way to find out the age of a link–at least I haven’t found one. You can fnd out the age of the web site the link is from, but not how long the actual link has been there. If you know of a way to determine link age, pass it along!
So stop worrying about how old your domain is and instead focus on how old the domain is you want a link from.
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