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Domain Age

What is Domain Age

Domain age is how long a domain has existed since its creation.

A domain created in 2010, for example, will be 10 years old in 2020 and 20 years in 2030.

Even if the domain get transferred due to ownership change, the domain age will remain the same and it will not reset with each new owner.

A new businesses can refer to the domain age metric when deciding which domain to buy since an older domain age represents more established and reliable factor.

You can check domain age of any site here.

Does Domain Age Matter in SEO?

The impact of domain age to SEO has been one of the biggest “myth” in SEO community.

While some think that there is an impact of how old your domain age is to the search ranking, the rest think that there is no correlation between them.

Here’s some of the facts that we know about domain age:

  • Sites are significantly devalued for the first few months after Google first discovers them.
  • It is nearly impossible for a new domain to get into the SERP for the first few months.
  • In fact, none of the SEO professional works for a brand new domain.

These facts supported by a video created by Matt Cutt, the head of Google’s web spam team:

In this video, Matt Cutt did not said that domain age doesn’t matter.

Instead, he was saying that the domain age has a small impact and advised to all the site owner to not worry to much about their domain age.

“The difference between a domain that’s six months old vs one year old is really not that big at all. As long as you’ve been around for at least a couple of months, you should be able make sure that you can show up in search results.”

He indicates that any very young domains will struggle to rank in the SERP and clearly indicating that there is a difference impact of a different domain age.

Domain Age Impact to Authority

Despite of the “myth” above about the domain age impact to the search ranking, a domain age does actually an indirect impact to the authority and ranking.

Older domain tends to have more authority than the newer one.

This is because, the old domain have history of attracting some backlinks from other sites even if the site owner did not do any link building.

However, this also depends on how long did the website up in the internet giving the age of the domain.

Google looks at the domain age just because if the site owner is updating the quality content from time to time.

Google will not be tricked if a domain purchased and then disappeared from their radar for a black hat SEO technique.