Is it a Google ranking factor?

Does Google prefer older, established domains in its search results?

Whether to buy Brand new domain name Put you at an SEO disadvantage?

These are just a few questions around domain age as a ranking factor-this topic has been a hotly debated topic for the past two decades.

We know that at least at a certain point in time Google regarded it as part of the document scoring algorithm.

Read on to find out whether domain age is really a Google search ranking factor.

Disclaimer: Domain age as a ranking factor

The proposition here is twofold:

• The longer Google includes domains in its index, the better it will be for your search rankings.
• The longer the domain name registration, the better your search rankings.

Basically, the argument here:

Suppose you registered two domains, one in 2010 and the other in 2020. Until three months ago, you had never published any content on any website.

This means that Google will consider the 2010 domain name “more powerful”-just because it was registered 10 years earlier than the second site, it should have an easier time ranking.

Does this seem logical?

Evidence of domain age as a ranking factor

already 2007, Some people in SEO believe that domain age is one of the top 10 most important ranking factors.

Recently, someone pointed out This Matt Cutts video As a “proof” domain age is a Google ranking factor.

Why?

Because in it, Cutts said: “The difference between a six-month-old domain name and a one-year-old domain name is really not that big.”

To some, it sounds like Google uses domain age as a ranking signal-although it may not be a very important signal.

Evidence against domain age as a ranking factor

The problem is, that video is from 2010.

This is what Katz actually said:

• Registrar data is not important at all. It is too difficult to collect, and Google cannot obtain enough information to be a reliable signal.
• What Google can measure is the time when the website was first crawled and the time when the website was first linked to by other websites.

Even so, he said,

“In fact, what determines your ranking in search engines is mainly the quality of your content and the type of links you get, because of the quality of your content.”

The 2005 patent application is called “Information retrieval based on historical dataAuthors: Matt Cutts, Paul Haahr and several others give us a deeper understanding of how Google perceives these domain signals at the time.

The patent outlines a method for identifying documents and assigning scores composed of different types of historical data.

These data include:

• Information about the date of its establishment.
• The elapsed time calculated from the start date.
• How and how often the content of the document changes over time.
• The average time between changes, the number of changes in the time period, and the comparison of the change rate of the current time period with the change rate of the previous time period.
• At least one of the following: the number of new pages associated with the document in a period of time, the ratio of the number of new pages associated with the document to the total number of pages associated with the document, and a document whose content percentage has changed over a period of time.
• The behavior of the link is related to at least one of the appearance and disappearance of one or more links to the document

There are more, but you can already see that this patent is by no means only related to the age of the domain name.

There are link elements and Content quality/freshness Here too.

The age of the domain name may have been a factor at the time. But there is no clear evidence that it is a direct ranking factor, but a weak signal in a more comprehensive document history score (this was/maybe still a ranking factor…maybe).

In any situation, John Mueller has made it clear about this point:

Domain age as a ranking factor: our judgment

Google stated that domain age is not a ranking factor-we have no reason to doubt them at this point.

The time you register your domain name has nothing to do with Google’s search algorithm.

Buy old domain name Will not help you rank faster or higher. In fact, you may inherit spam links or other negative associations, which may harm your SEO efforts.

But again, this is not entirely due to the age-this is what happened in the field in those years.

Bottom line: Google does not use domain age as a direct search ranking signal.

Featured image: Paul Bobita