Domain Age: Does Really Matter When Ranking in Google

an aged domain is a domain that has previously been indexed by Google in the past two or more years. This is a requisite for the success of any SEO campaign since Google’s algorithm has been beefed up to factor in how long ago a domain was first indexed by the
search engine.
If you have a new, or relatively new domain name, Google’s algorithm filters the impact of everything SEO related, On-Site and Off-Site, diminishing any optimization efforts you may try to institute in the first couple of years of a domain’s existence. This means that links don’t get as much weight, even if they are prominent ones, social media shares don’t matter as much, even if there are many of them, and any other normally affective SEO effort’s impact is dampened. As a result, the SEO score is diminished along with the visibility of that domain’s listings on SERPs.

Being stuck with a domain that’s new isn’t the end of the world. However, if you’re going to make any significant moves to rank higher on the SERPs, you must allocate an aged domain. An aged domain name is not considered aged based on the date of the initial registration of the domain itself (located in the WHOIS database), but rather, the initial date that Google indexed the domain.

Aged Domain

An aged domain name can be either a domain name that you have owned for two or more years, or a domain name that was won at auction. No matter how old the domain however, if it was never actually indexed by Google, it’s not considered an aged domain.

If you have a domain name that was registered and indexed by Google less then two years ago, and you’re attempting to rank for highly competitive keywords, then your efforts will be nothing short of futile. In competing to rank at the top of Google’s SERPs, you’re better off purchasing an aged domain name at auction and building up the SEO value of that domain name, and linking your original domain name to the aged one.

Over time, your original domain name will increase in SEO value and won’t have its results filtered (or Sandboxed) by Google. While this may be a difficult decision for some, without an aged domain name, you’ll be trapped on low-level SERPs wondering to yourself how come you’re not ranking high when you’ve done everything else to boost your site’s SEO.

This is probably one of the most important insider trade secrets to SEO that’s not discussed in many other places. Most people either gloss over this or simply haven’t analyzed enough data and had enough experience with both aged and new domain names to be able to tell the difference.