Old domains are fantastic buys if you can get your hands on them while it is limited Google does put some emphasis on age within the rankings and while we may be seeing a shift away from this with freshness of a page also being rewarded. The answer is to have an old domain with fresh new content.
When hunting for domains I tend to look for domains more then 5 years old which are sitting on page 2 for the keyword I’m chasing. When picking up old domains check through their backlinks if they have nice links from places like Dmoz or Best of the Web for many categories its easier to buy a site already in these directories then to submit a new site and potentially wait years for entry.
A few things to watch out for;
- Check the domain is listed in Google and has not been banned
- Check for trademark infringements and make sure to confirm you are dealing with the real owner
- Make sure that the owner can transfer the domain on its own, or you could be stuck in the previous owners hosting contract
- When the domain is up for renewal
Trust Rank
A discussion on domain age couldn’t really take place without mentioning the concepts of Trust Rank which both Google and Yahoo have been pursuing. The idea is that a web site is given a trust score in much the same way pages use t be assigned PageRank the higher the score the more trusted the source and in theory higher the rankings for the site. While both Yahoo who has a patent covering a basic algorithm for TrustRank and Google have been looking at what factors determine trust neither has publically declared moves to using such a system. But if and when they do the age of the domain will almost certainly be one of the major factors.
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