Domain Age Tool
How Old Is Your Domain?
Domain age may not be the most important factor in SEO, but it plays it's part. Older domains have more weight to search engines simply because they have been established longer. Combined with quality content and strong search engine optimization, an old domain can be hard to topple from the top of search results.
Why Does Domain Age Matter?
Remember that search engine bot we spoke of? If not, you may want to read through some of our other articles. The search enigne bot is programmed to know if a domain is new, or has been around since the dinosaurs. To combat spam, Google added in a few items to their search alogoritm that likes older domains. Does that mean you can't rank high with a new domain that you just bought? No, it simply means that older domains are more established, and tell the search engines that it's a legit business. Let's get into that a bit more, or if you are bored, just scroll to the bottom of the page to use the free tool.
In The Good Old Days...
In the old days, black hat SEO's (evil internet marketers) would register a domain for a year, or a short period of time. Generally, these were keyword-driven domains (meaning they had keywords in the domain URL) used to deceive the search enignes. The way this worked is by having a very specific page with exact-match keyords in the URL, Google tended to rank these sites a lot higher, and push the established people further down in search results. Spammers or black-hats would then wash and repeat for a large number of domains and desireable keywords, until they had all the choice keywords covered. People complained, and Google changed it's algorithm to be able to read domain age and registration time.
Watson, the Spammers are Afoot!
Since more cost is involved in registering a domain for a longer period of time, most spammers would not invest the time (creating rich content for 10+ sites) or money (multiple 5 year registrations at ~$75 each) into doing this. On Google's part, it was a very clever way to not only combat spam, but also give the businesses that were already established a better chance at ranking. In the video, Matt Cutts will not admit this, as that would be giving away part of what the Google algorithm is. Pound for pound, if you compare 2 sites (one old, one new) both with quality content and backlinks, the old site will generally (not in all cases) rank higher.
To use the domain age tool provided by our friends at WebConfs, simply copy and paste or type in your domain and click submit. Once you click submit, the domain age tool will allow you to enter the domains of your competitors once you are redirected.
If you found this tool valuable, check out the links below. Want even more? MOZ's Open Site Explorer offers domain information (and much more) for a cost. You can also check the free domain age tools by visiting WHOis and DomainTools. If you have any questions about this tool, or would like to know how we can boost the visibility of your domain, get in touch.
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