Is domain age no longer a factor?
-
Most of you have already seen the Matt Cutts video saying that domain age is insignificant after a few months. Do people agree with that? I have a friend who has a domain that is over 12 years old, but the name is not great. gaport.com for a business that sells primarily carports and garages. After watching this video, he wants to rebrand his site with a new name and scrap the old domain for something more marketable. Before he does this, I'd like to know if domain age really isn't a factor anymore?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
“Overall 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?
Even best SEO Experts have failed to get a spam free domain in one go
Because domains that get Expired might have been used in past for the purposes of Gambling, Spamming, Illegal Content, Adult Websites etc.
We have written a post in detail on this topic, whether Domain Age is an SEO Factor or not?
Do check it out & give us your valuable insights.
[link removed by admin]
-
if we talk about a domain by itself it is not a privilage to have an old one. Your domain is listed in dmoz and yahoo directories and has more other backlinks. And those backlinks are more valuable then the exact age.
-
Although domain name age might not be important, other aspects of a mature domain could give support to rankings.
I redirected a domain that held #1 rankings for a commercial keyword unchallenged for ten consecutive years. This was a domain, popular in its niche, that was getting over 500,000 pageviews per month.
Changing the domain resulted in the loss of over 1000 people per month arriving at the site through domain queries typed into the google search box, lots of direct visitors from the domain typed in browser address bar, probably lots of people clicking its entries in the SERPs because of domain recognition, loss of huge sitelinks.
Once you switch the domain all of that tribe support - measurable by Google - disappears. BAM!
After 301 redirecting the site dropped immediately in the SERPs, recovered quickly to #2 and then retook #1 after domain queries were back up over 1000 per month. - but that took many months and lots of lost sales for the former level of tribe support to reestablish on the new domain.
It currently is at #3 with a couple big brands above it. Revenue is down.
I can't say if it would still be holding off those big brands - because Google seems to be giving them strong favor these days - but if I could go back a couple years, I might not have changed the domain.
-
Ruben -
It sounds like the consensus of the coverage on Matt Cutt's statements show that:
- Google still uses domain name age as a factor, but it sounds like it's not nearly as important as unique, high-quality content, and other trust signals such as external links.
- Google does pay attention to domain name age, especially during the first 2-3 months of a domain's lifetime.
I still think domain name age is a factor for how pages rank, as Google still does like pages that "have withstood the test of time." (Google also likes fresh new content, too.)
My hunch is that your friend would take a short-term hit on traffic, and in order to get the site to rank well, the site will need to focus on a high-quality user experience, great content, etc.
I could perhaps see an interesting section on the site devoted to the best (or worst) garages and carports.
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
-
Fresh backlinks vs old backlinks: A solid ranking factor?
Hi Moz community, Backlinks being a major ranking factor, do they must be very recent or fresh to make a ranking difference compared to the backlinks which are years old? We know usually fresh content ranks well, but I wonder how much the fresh/recent backlinks impact in rankings. Do the years old backlinks from related and reputed website have same impact on rankings? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Domain Extensions
I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the new domain extensions that are now available. I'm considering buying a couple .lawyer and .attorney domains for clients. I noticed when I tried to buy these I was asked for verification if we're going to be offering legal services through the site. That led me to think that it may be possible in the future that with this verification, if it's required, that means that not just anybody can have these domain names. That leads me to think that it's possible that these domains may benefit from users searching for terms with "lawyer" or "attorney" in their search term. I haven't seen anything in terms of these domain extensions and SEO yet, but I'd like to know your thoughts as to how these will be treated in the future. I can imagine these will be more valuable than the old .net, .us, .info, etc., domains.
Algorithm Updates | | Millermore0 -
What's the current situation for exact match ecommerce domains
I'm looking for some current opinions on exact-match domains when it comes to ecommerce sites. I currently own an "OK" brandable domain in a specific ecommerce niche. The opportunity has now come along to own the exact match domain for this category. For example catfood.com Is it more advisable to focus on brandables these days? I know Google doesn't give weight to exact match anymore but is there still a correlation not causation factor to consider? IE: the links back would be more targeted possibly?
Algorithm Updates | | NoClueSEO0 -
New .TLD domains - SEO Value?
Hi all, I see that a new wave of domains are to be released soon. We are not talking or 1 or 2 new extensions, but more like 700 new extensions on a TLD level. What's your views on their SEO value? thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Ranking factors
I found this page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is there any new page with more up to date data ? Thank you i.
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend. We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days. Zero back links, no seo, etc. Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it. Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1. About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
Why is my domain authority (and page authority) plummeting?
In June our domain authority was at a 41. In July we were 38 and ever since then our domain authority is gradually getting worse and worse. We went from a 33 to a 29 in one week! Possible explanations include: Maybe the SEO we hired (for a few months in late 2011) added our domain to some less-than-awesome directories The 301 redirects on our home page are hurting us somehow Duplicate content for URL's with different capitalization (IE: /pages/aboutus and /Pages/AboutUs) Can someone please point me in the right direction? Which of the above possibilities would likely impact domain/page authority? Any other ideas as to why this might be happening? Any suggestions for improving our domain or page authority? Thanks for the help!
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelBrown550 -
How do I rank multiple pages for my busness/domain name?
When someone searches for our business's name (which is also the domain name) we have one listing (with sitelinks) at the top - however I would also like to rank 2nd, 3rd and 4th for this term. Any suggestions on how this might be done? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | CaBStudios0