One of the many factors to ranking well in Goolge is the age of your website. Google will always put more faith in a site that has been around for years than one that has just been setup (that doesn’t mean that a brand new website can’t rank well, it just means it will have to work a little harder to do so).
What we mean by an “old” site
Before I go too much further, I should point-out that when I talk about the age of a website, I’m not talking about the date the domain name was registered, but instead the date Google first discovered and indexed your site. A domain could be 10 years old but if it has never been used, or if Google has never crawled the site, then it will have no more trust than a domain that was registered yesterday. So when we use the term “age of a site” we’re really saying “how long has Google known about it” instead of the actual age of the domain name.
It’s not just the age of your site but also the age of your inbound links
This is where things start getting a little tricky. Lets say you’ve had an “under construction” page for a couple of years and initially had a few friends or family link to your page to let Google know you exist. Now you decide to build a proper site and start collecting links thinking that your site will instantly do well because it has some age behind it.
Sure it will help, although it’s not just the age of the site which is important, but also the age of the links that point to your website. For the best results you need a nicely aged (and indexed) site with some equally aged, well trusted links. If you have this combination, you’ve got your hands on some SEO Old Gold.
Some myths about domain age
People have often tried to “game” the system by purchasing old domain names that already have PageRank, a good Alexa ranking, backlinks etc. only to find that they lose the PR and often the weight of the links when the Whois data is changed or when they upload a totally different website.
Whilst this technique can still work if done well (here’s some hints from SEOmoz on grabbing old domains), I believe you would be far better off devoting your time and money in building a solid brand and good content with a brand-new domain. Aaron Wall gives some of his own advice on how to make a new domain outrank an old one.
Another myth that I was asked about recently was if it makes any difference how long you register a domain for. Would buying a domain name today and paying for a 10-year registration up-front give you a better chance of out-ranking a domain that’s only been registered for a year? I personally don’t believe this makes any difference at all.
Parting words of wisdom
So if you have a domain name that you’ve been holding onto thinking that it’ll make you rich you’d best start building some content and links for it sooner rather than later and instead of chasing old domains, try and get nice old, well trusted links because Google respects its elders.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
0 Responses to “Google respects its elders”