The Age of Your Domain in SEO

SEO is all encompassing and is generally attempting to get improved SERPS for a particular domain.

For the past year or so (or more) you may get frustrated that a domain with a PR4 and limited backlinks is stuck at number 1 for your most important keywords and seems impossible to shift.

There is one factor that certainly google uses to rank pages and domains and that is the age of the domain.

But not just the age - it’s probably also the length of time that domain, or the links pointing to that domain, have been about.

Google uses the age factor a lot to keep older websites at the top. Newer websites take an age to get high ranks for competitive keywords and older domains rule the roost. I have seen this. I have 3 websites that range from 1998 to 2001 in age in terms of when they were first registered. However, my oldest domain ranks nowhere but the other 2 are top of the pile.

The reason the oldest doesn’t rank at all is probably because it was just parked for the first 7 years of its life. There were no inbound links to that page and certainly no pages online that google could index. What I have done with that domain is to target a really non competitive phrase and pointed a few links to it so that it gets indexed and I have just left it.

I will probably leave it for another year before I do anything with it because unless I implement a consistent ongoing link campaign nothing is going to happen.

So what should you do ?

There are 2 choices I believe. Either buy an existing website in the theme you want to develop that has been around for many years and is ranking for a few terms that might get 30-50 visitors a day and then develop it slowly or register domains today, point some links to it and leave it be for a few years.

On this last item, I have also another site I registered in 2004 that I did this for. Now I am just starting to develop that site 2 years on and its starting to rank for some good terms.

So the age of the domain is important in SEO but it’s not just the age it’s also the age of the links and the age of content collected in Google.