Domain Age. What's a good age?
-
I have a new site that ranks very well and is rich with content. I know that it would rank better but since it's new I'm assuming that it is being held back. My question is how long does it take for a site to mature?
-
Thanks Keri
-
Open Site Explorer isn't a live crawl, and the data there can be a little old. There is an update scheduled for tomorrow, so I'd wait a day and check for your links tomorrow -- the data will be a lot fresher then, but still a few weeks old.
Keri
-
Thanks for your advice, I appreciate it. I used the Open Site Explorer tool here but for some reason I don't see the links that are pointing to my site. Google Webmasters shows i have over 1000 links which are all natural links and another tool shows that I have over 750 links.
What would you change about the site?
How would you rebuild the site?
It is a work in progress so your advice helps.
Thanks again.
-
Hi Joel,
Just took a look at your website. I'll give you some quick points.
Bluntly, your website needs work. It needs to be completely re-built.
If you want to to build up authority for your site, you need to do so through link building. If you want to get natural links as opposed to paying for links or submitting to low quality directories, you need link-worthy content. That takes me back to my first point about a new website.
SEO Moz's Open Site Explorer is a great tool where you can take a look at the websites that are ranking well for your top keywords, and you can see where those sites are getting their links from.
-
Now I see sites above me that have domain age on their side but they don't have as many links. I have a lot of links that are organic. I also have a more robust site full of unique content that my competitors don't have. So in this case what steps should I take? Thank you for your advice.
-
So what is the best strategy for competing against other sites who have domain age and authority. I am a Realtor and my site is up against some large national sites. I am targeting local keywords with local info. Thanks for your advice.
-
I think this is one of those things that SEOs hear a little bit about, then stress out about. Although high rankings & an older domain may be highly correlated, that does not mean that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between ranking & age of domain. It's simply natural that the longer a domain is around (and the longer an actual website resides on that domain) that website/domain has more opportunity to build up its domain authority and their rankings.
-
I've found a few different topics about this and it seems to be the consensus that domain age does(n't) matter... people don't seem to really have a definite answer. There is a study that shows that a large percentage (over 50%) of #1 search results are domains over 10 years old, but younger than 10 years seemed to be pretty even. The target keywords would also play a factor.. if the keyword you're going for has been around for a long time, the older domains that are ranking for that keyword will be much harder to topple with a young domain.
Another side note is just the number of links a site can accumulate over 10 years over a very young domain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
Hi, 9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places. For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite. I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin1 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Should we use URL parameters or plain URL's=
Hi, Me and the development team are having a heated discussion about one of the more important thing in life, i.e. URL structures on our site. Let's say we are creating a AirBNB clone, and we want to be found when people search for apartments new york. As we have both have houses and apartments in all cities in the U.S it would make sense for our url to at least include these, so clone.com/Appartments/New-York but the user are also able to filter on price and size. This isn't really relevant for google, and we all agree on clone.com/Apartments/New-York should be canonical for all apartment/New York searches. But how should the url look like for people having a price for max 300$ and 100 sqft? clone.com/Apartments/New-York?price=30&size=100 or (We are using Node.js so no problem) clone.com/Apartments/New-York/Price/30/Size/100 The developers hate url parameters with a vengeance, and think the last version is the preferable one and most user readable, and says that as long we use canonical on everything to clone.com/Apartments/New-York it won't matter for god old google. I think the url parameters are the way to go for two reasons. One is that google might by themselves figure out that the price parameter doesn't matter (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en) and also it is possible in webmaster tools to actually tell google that you shouldn't worry about a parameter. We have agreed to disagree on this point, and let the wisdom of Moz decide what we ought to do. What do you all think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peekabo0 -
How do you find old linking url's that contain uppercase letters?
We have recently moved our back office systems, on the old system we had the ability to use upper and lower case letters int he url's. On the new system we can only use lower case, which we are happy with. However any old url's being used from external sites to link into us that still have uppercase letterign now hit the 404 error page. So, how do we find them and any solutions? Example: http://www.christopherward.co.uk/men.html - works http://www.christopherward.co.uk/Men.html - Fails Kind regards Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Duncan_Moss0 -
Google fluctuates its result on Chrome's private browsing
I have seen an interesting Google behaviour this morning. As usual, I would open Chrome's private browsing to see how a keyword is ranking. This was what I see... Typed in "sell my car", I see Auto Trader page on 3rd. (Ref:Sell My Car 1st result img) Googled something else, then re-Googled "sell my car" and saw that our page went to 2nd! I repeated the same process and saw that we went from 3rd to 2nd again. Has Google results gone mental? PaGXJ.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tmg.seo0 -
Questions regarding Google's "improved url handling parameters"
Google recently posted about improving url handling parameters http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html I have a couple questions: Is it better to canonicalize urls or use parameter handling? Will Google inform us if it finds a parameter issue? Or, should we have a prepare a list of parameters that should be addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Ranking for our member's company names without giving them all away!
Hi, We have a directory of 25,000 odd companies who use our site. We have a strong PR site and want to rank a page for each company name. Some initial testing on one or two company names brings us to #2 after the company's own web site in the format: "Company Name Reviews and Feedback" - so it works well. We want to do this for all 25,000 of our members, however we do not wish to make it easy for our competitors to scrape through our member database!! e.g. using: www.ourdomain.com/randomstring/company-name-(profile).php unfortunately with the above performing a search on google for site:domain.com/()/()(profile).php would bring up all records. Are there any tried and tested ways of achieving what we're after here? Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0