How much does domain age play a part today?
-
My specific reason for asking this is due to the need to consolidate two of my client's websites into one main umbrella. The two websites now are duplicating content between each other. They are essentially the same business with two locations. The goal is to have one website to build authority on, reduce management/maintenance time and eliminate the duplicate content issues.
In doing so, we will need to use a completely different domain name for branding reasons. I'm concerned that this may hurt us due to it being a brand new domain name. With the current websites, one domain is 8 years old and the other 2 years old.
-
Thank you so much for your response. It may be limiting to them in some ways for marketing, but its also a beneficial change as well. I think if domain age isn't going to play too much of a part, then all the other factors still justify the change.
Thanks again!
-
How difficult would it be to rewrite the content? There are definite benefits to having two standalone sites, especially since they are different locations it's all on the up and up.
a) Having two sites means possibly ranking on the first page twice
b) In a world where Google keeps changing the rules and keeps penalizing it's good to not have all your eggs in one basket
c) Throwing away a established aged domain with PR seems like a waste, especially if it's ranking
d) Two sites gives you the ability to market differently, if one massage doesn't speak well to a particular audience perhaps the other site will and vice versa
-
Matt Cutts somewhere said that the difference between a domain that's six month old verses one year old is really not that big at all. So we can guess that they use domain age as a ranking factor, but it is not so important.
There is a great infographic about Google ranking factors: http://www.entrepreneur.com/dbimages/article/ranking_factors_infographic_2.jpg
-
With all things being equal, an older domain is typically better for SEO reasons. However, if you are doing your redirects correctly to the new domain, should be no issue.
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
-
How much content is duplicate content? Differentiate between website pages, help-guides and blog-posts.
Hi all, I wonder that duplicate content is the strong reason beside our ranking drop. We have multiple pages of same "topic" (not exactly same content; not even 30% similar) spread across different pages like website pages (product info), blog-posts and helpguides. This happens with many websites and I wonder is there any specific way we need to differentiate the content? Does Google find the difference across website pages and blog-pots of same topic? Any good reference about this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do the referring domains matter a lot in back-links? Google's stand?
Hi, It's a known fact about quality of back-links than quantity. Still domains are heavily different from links. Multiple domains are huge comparing to multiple links. Taking an average, how much does 'number of referring domains" boost website authority? I am not speaking about low quality domains, just number of domains including which are irrelevant to the topic or industry. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
6 year old Corporate domain lost all rankings on EMD day.
Hello, our company's website goo.gl/7Q56G lost all our rankings after the EMD algo update. Our domain is NOT a EMD. At the same time, I found that we have about 6000 new, extremely low quality spam backlinks with the same anchor text ("loan"). I saw some of those a few weeks ago, but didn't really pay much attention because I didn't believe Google would think we build those. I didn't get any messages on webmaster central. If this occurred with the EMD update, is it because of the low quality backlinks? Most of the real spammers, brokers (we are the actual funding source) are now dominating the top 10 for our main keyword "merchant cash advance". We were in the top 10 for the past 4 years, why would we get hit so hard now? I really appreciate your advice.
Algorithm Updates | | DaveMri1 -
How can we start to improve Domain MozRank & MozTrust for our website?
A simple question maybe, but how and where do we start if we want to improve our 'Domain MozRank & Moztrust', 'assuming of course that by improving both these we will improve our rankings with Google plus sales?
Algorithm Updates | | ewanTHH0 -
Another Domain ranking instead of my Domain
Hi My Domain name is Replicahause.net, 2 weeks ago my server had an outage for 3 days and my rankings dissappeared in google entirely, however i also noticed that when i typed in my domain name "replicahause" or "replicahause.net" , i would see abhishekyadav.com appearing on #1 in google which does a 301 into Replicahause.net I was able to convince the owner of Abhishekyadav to remove the 301 but my site Replicahause.net's Rankings still does not appear to have come back to google, is there something i'm missing here ? We were ranked #1 to #10 for at least 40 keywords, they've just seemed to dissappeard after the server downtime we had and the 301 from AbhishekYadav.com Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jansimon0 -
Redirected old domain to new, how long before seeing the external links under the new domain?
Before contracting SEO services, my client decided to change his established root domain to one more customer-friendly. Since he had no expertise on board, no redirects were set up until 6 months later. I ran stats right before the old domain was redirected and have a report showing that he had roughly 750 external links from 300 root domains. We redirected the old domain to the new domain in mid Jan 2012. Those external links are still not showing in Open Site Explorer for the new domain. I've tested it a dozen times, and the old domain definitely points to the new domain. How long should it take before the new domain picks up those external links? Should I do anything else to help the process along?
Algorithm Updates | | smsinc0 -
Why google index ip address instead of the domain name?
I have a website ,now google index ip address of it instead of the domain name,I have used 301 redirected to the domain name,but how to change the index IP to its domain name? And why google index the IP address?
Algorithm Updates | | frankfans1170