Notes on Age of Domain Names
March 12, 2008 · Print This Article
The age of a domain is an important ranking factor in Google, where older sites generally rank better. You can outrank an older site if you’ve got the right trusted links and good on-page SEO, but, all things considered, old sites tend to do better. Since these sites have been around a long time, Google knows they aren’t just part of some spammer’s short-term “pump-and-dump” ranking strategy, so they’re viewed as being more trusted.
Beyond Google’s preference for old sites, there’s also the fact that older sites have had longer to build links. So if your competitor’s domain launched in 1996 and yours started in 2004, they’ve got an 8-year head start on link-building and content creation. That’s a significant advantage.
The Wayback Machine will give you an idea of when search engines first started indexing pages from a site. The drawback to the Wayback Machine is that it only goes back to 1996, so if a site came online in 1994 the Wayback Machine will still show its birthday as 1996. However, that doesn’t much matter because you’re not really concerned with a site’s specific birthdate, just with whether it’s a old site or a new site. Any site from the 90’s is officially
old by Internet standards.
To put things in perspective, a site launched in 1996 will not have much advantage over a site launched in 1998 (other than 2 additional years to build content and links). But it will have an often significant advantage over a site launched in 2004.
The other problem with the Wayback Machine is that some sites block its crawler. This means that site won’t be listed. In that case you can sometimes use Netcraft.com. For example, here’s where you can find the NetCraft birthdate for Google.com.
If that doesn’t work, you can always go with the date their whois info reports, such as that provided by domaintools.com:
However, this isn’t a very reliable way to get a site’s age since the domain may have been purchased long ago but never put online. For example, we have several domains we bought in 1996 that were never turned into sites. If we were to create a site on them today, search engines would consider their birthday to be 2006, not 1996.
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