How important is the domain age?

[SeLFiE_12]

domain age is one of the factor that SEs looks into...

[Seo Madrid]

Originally Posted by SeLFiE_12

domain age is one of the factor that SEs looks into...

Well, I know that, my question was more intented to find out how important it is within the SEs algorithm, as I´m observing that old domains with weaker popularity are ranking better than newer domains.

[factoring]

4000 backlinks is quite a bit. That persons website deserves to be ranked high, as long as they were quality back links.

[tdd1984]

speaking of domain age, I'm getting ready to write an article on how domain age can really have impact on rankings, I got a client that is boomin with traffic, and has only 4k backlinks, but is getting almost20k hits a day with a 1996 domain

[Chatmaster]

Also take note the type of links to the site ranking high as the quality and position of the incoming backlinks to that site might be of higher value than it's competitors. A very important point to take note of is that the older domain had more time to build natural links of high value than the new domain. Domain age do play a role for the following reason as well Google patent on information retrieval based on historical data. This is why domains only really start performing well in their 2nd year. But remember there are more factors at play than domain age. One way of overcoming this ranking factor is to do shotgun SEO for the first few months of a website's life. Shotgun SEO targets many non competitive keywords trying to hit as many variations of the keywords as possible in order to hit some of them, lol. one of the reasons why content rules.

[EWSitesCom]

i know that the age of the domain name is important but if I buy a new domain should I get that for more than five years and is that considered and aged name??

[Natural Elements]

I am experimenting what Manish said. One of my new directory is registred with 5 years and the other directory only 1 year. I will see the result very soon.

[factoring]

A lot of professional seo's will not even work with a client unless their domain is at least 2 years old.

[Chatmaster]

Just want to ad that the domain age is determined not by when it was registered, but for how long it was indexed by google. I would say 2 years is good enough.

[I-Got-IT!]

Originally Posted by lizza

As Manish said,the age of domain is a new technique of G to calculate the trusty.As you register a domain for long period,google will trust your website as you are going to do some serious thing in your domain and will rank high.

So it's not recommended for people to keep changing domain names?

[jess12]

Originally Posted by EWSitesCom

i know that the age of the domain name is important but if I buy a new domain should I get that for more than five years and is that considered and aged name??

5 years from now, yes

Originally Posted by factoring

A lot of professional seo's will not even work with a client unless their domain is at least 2 years old.

Agreed. A lot of them do consider the domain age.

[ClassTopic.com]

I've got an old site I used to use back in high school (7 years old), but the pagerank on it is zero because I haven't updated it since then. If I do some work to it, do you think it might be able to generate some revenue?

[peter_d]

It's difficult to tell what aspects Google favors.

An older site probably has a lot of other factors going for it, like traffic and aged link data, which would make it difficult to isolate domain age as a deciding factor. For example, sites like Digg rank very well, but they're not old.

It's about having a variety of markers of credibility. New sites must establish credibility, by way of links, traffic, an a audience etc.

All else flows from those factors...

[sheena]

Domain age is one of the most important factor of Google algorithm. You may read article about the domain age of google.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The best way to improve your placement in the search engine results is to focus on increasing the number of natural incoming links to your website. Spend your time focusing on giving your visitors solid quality content and you will see this start to happen automatically.

Originally Posted by Seo Madrid

I've heard that G considers the domain age as an important SEO factor, as that works filtering some spammy domains. How important do you think this is?

[cloudtrance]

Grandpa domains do carry a lot of weight with the SE's as do back links from them..It does shows being in there and planning for the long haul has its just rewards...

[Mark07]

Domain age has a good amount of effect on the site according to Google as it values it more than the new ones.The age of the domain also helps in keeping the SERP better if compared to the new domains, not including the backlinks criteria in it.
If you have a domain name which is very old and in future if you decide to change it than that decision will be affecting the position of the site in the eye's of Google as its going to be a complete new site for the particular search engine.

[peter_d]

Does anyone have any proof ?

For those who say it is important - how did you test that domain age is an important factor? And, if it is, how did you determine how much of a factor it is? What weight does it have?

I'd be careful listing to the opinions of any self-professed SEO expert. And just because it's published on SEOMOz, does not make it true

I think the truest statement on that report in relation to old domains is this:

it's not really the age of the site that's important it's the age of the links to the site that are - Michael Gray

I would argue that it's very difficult to test the effect of domain age. The reason why I think that is because there are enough new domains that rank well, and enough old domains that don't. If the age of the domain was a very important factor, then they'd surely always outrank new domains.

But they don't.

Therefore, isolating the effect of domain age is, at best, difficult.

Not saying the age of the domain doesn't count at all, of course.

[sniperhiga]

If we take 2 websites (new and old) and build 500 backlinks with the same anchor in 1 night.
New site will be most likely banned. Old domain will survive.

[temyong]

Major search engine prioritize old domain.

[harsha22]

G considers age of domain very important. G thinks the more the age of a domain, better is its trust rank in G's eyes.