Notes on Age of Domain Names

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:

http://whois.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.

Google Answers Will End

Google Answers, the very first product Google launched other than Search is ending. The service allowed you to post a question and get someone to research the answer for a fee. I personally used Google Answers 4 times in the past 3 years and thought it was a great service, ahh well, I guess next time I need to ask a question I can’t find the answer to I’ll give Yahoo Answers a try. You can read more from the Google Blog.

Visitor Eye Movements

I recently fount this cool article that looks at web site user eye movements. The article also covers the different levels of area concentration on each part of the page. Worth checking out, especially if you are running adverts on your site.

Domain Format

I’m often asked about which is the best route to go when buying domain names.
Should I Include keywords? Use “-” to separate words? .com, .co.uk, .net? length of the domain?

Here’s my view:
Always use your primary keyword if possible! This will help a little with rankings, especially with MSN. If you plan to attract business worldwide, use a .com - almost all type ins start with a .com and in my view, a .com looks more professional than a .net or .biz (One exception: non-profit organisations such as charities, in my opinion, should use a .org domain.)

If your site is aimed at the UK market, use a .co.uk - when I’m searching something related to the UK, I would generally click on a .co.uk domain over a .com I’m not keen on using “-” within domains, I think they look spammy! Especially if you use more than one. Only use a “-” once if the two words together are hard to see, especially if you plan to promote the domain in print media.

Many people think that the search engines may not recognise a 2 word key phrase if they don’t use a “-”: they do! Like our domain, we have seobangkok.com The search engines will understand that the keyword may be: SEO Bangkok or SEOBangkok

Last but not least, the length of the domain. Try to keep the domain short if possible as it looks more professional and is easier to remember. I also think long domains look spammy, as well could the search engines!

Audition Update

About 3 months ago I read an article in my weekly magazine that a film company is seeking actors for a new movie called Back to the Bronz Forest. I applied for an audition and got accepted. During the audition I had to read a script in front of many people and learnt about the character:

He’s a Karen, just trained to be a mahout (elephant’s trainer), he’s in love with MALEE, his teacher’s daughter. He has the nature of a proud young man, and he thinks the world exists for his amusement. He does what it takes to get what he wants.

Yes, the audition was scary but a lot of fun. They have said that they will let me know if I get accepted so will keep you informed.

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