domains Google Answers If Domain Age Impacts Rankings

[Lox]

Google's John Mueller answers the question about domain age and any impact on search rankings.

... Here’s where SEOs misread the patent. This information is not used to rank “legitimate” domains. The registration data is used to find spam sites.

Here’s what it says:

“Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”

read more (SEJ)

 

[AEProgram]

Great time to buy Godaddy's stock ?

Great article and people should read it because it addresses your post title.

If you are curious why some SEO companies focus on it, the reason is not direct.

We all know that good quality relevant backlinks matter. The SEO companies can make sure your site has great content, keep visitors there, but they need to work hard to get you those backlinks from relevant good places.

What they do is they have these aged domains with quality blogs on it. So imagine if you are their client and you sell used car parts in Chicago. They will contact people in Chicago in a related business than yours and offer to write a really great article about them with amazing praises to get that business to link to the article. The whole blog will be about cars / repair / insurance etc. In that article that is now being linked to proudly by businesses related to the auto industry, they will also link to their SEO clients business.

By using an aged domain for their blog, people are more likely to respond to them. They say "We are looking to write a story about your business after reading great reviews, our site ---.com has been around since 1997."

This is very clever because in the article they do not link back to the businesses! They mention them, they mention their number and even their URL but not as a link. So their outbound links are low and they have all these quality inbounds that are relevant and the one that does get the link is their SEO client.

Obviously most SEO companies will not do all this work, but those that do (I don't know any in these days), get things done unless you are not realistic, and for them, the age of domains matter.

 

[MKA]

Aged domains are generally considered valuable because they've been off the market for a long time. The pioneers had a lot of options, today we don't. That of course doesn't mean that a domain registered in 2010 can't be more valuable than a domain registered in 2000. It's just that it's unlikely. And since there's no simple way to gauge value of a domain, it's age can serve as a god indicator.

But I do understand why it doesn't directly affect SEO, and I agree that it shouldn't. But I do agree that the expiration date should affect things. After all, domains that are to be used are renewed for a longer period of time than domains listed for sale.