Impact of Domain Age on SEO and Rankings

Video Summary

Dan Petrovic comments on video by Matt Cutts about the effect of domain age on SEO and rankings.

• Due to WHOIS data being inconsistent across different registrars and TLDs Google had to employ their own metrics on judging domain age.
  • First Crawl
  • Link Discovery (which ultimately leads to a crawl)
  • Historical domain data (they patented a version of this)
• It’s unclear but it seems like domains aged over 2-3 months do get a bit of a different treatment by Google.
• Buying an aged domain (e.g. from 1994) will not necessarily help SEO, but links might.
  • This could also depend on whether domain dropped out at some point or not as that event gets recorded.
• Placeholders and coming soon pages are OK to have while website is being developed.
  • Note: This probably does not count for parked affiliate only domains (e.g. SEDO) which could potentially give a wrong hint as to purpose of your site.
• Content quality attracts links and links are what drives rankings.