DOMAIN NAME AGE – 1 BIG GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

Many SEO professional claim that the older your Domain URL, the higher it will rank. This belief is based on their experience, a patent Google filed on December 31, 2003 titled ‘Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data‘, and Google’s John Mueller on July 5, 2019 on twitter has said ‘domain age helps nothing‘.

A 2003 patent application called “Information retrieval based on historical data” by Matt Cutts, Paul Haahr, and several others gives us a bit more insight into how Google perceived these domain signals.

In 2007, several professionals in SEO believed domain age to be one of the top 10 most important ranking factors.

In 2010, some pointed to this Matt Cutts video as “proof” domain age is a Google ranking factor. Cutts stated: “The difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one-year-old is really not that big at all. The fact is, it’s mostly the quality of your content and the sort of links that you get because of the quality of your content that determines how well you’re going to rank in the search engines.”

Domain age may have been a factor back in that time frame. But there’s no real evidence it was a direct ranking factor so much as a slight signal inside of a more comprehensive document history score.

John Mueller has been clear when he stated on Twitter:

“No, domain age helps nothing.”

I believe John when he stated in 2019 that the ‘age’ of the domain is not a direct ranking factor. There are so many things that happen to an active website over time that the ‘age’ of the domain gives the ‘appearance’ of being a ranking factor, even though ‘directly’ it is not likely.

So, based on the above, how long you register your domain would not appear to matter to Google’s search algorithm.

Therefore, buying old domains won’t help you rank faster or higher. In fact, you could inherit junk links or other negative associations that could hurt your SEO efforts.

Again, that’s not purely because of the age, it’s the history that domain during those years that impacts in ranking. How active it’s been. Whether Google has penalized it. The amount of traffic that has regularly visited the site. The content growth in pages and helpfulness to visitors. These items bring impact are more of a Google Ranking Factor than the Domain Name Age.

Many SEO professionals, including myself, have gotten their clients ranked onto Page 1 of a Google Search in a matter of a few weeks, or less, on a brand new domain name. This would agree with the above data presented that the age of your domain plays little value at all in ranking.