Does the Age of Your Website Matter In Getting Rankings?

There have been consistent arguments about how the age of a website factors in higher search engine rankings. There are different schools of thoughts on this matter. For some, the age of the website  and its domain is relevant as google seems to favor old sites. While for others, age is not a major determinant in helping your website get higher rankings.

For those who feel that age plays a role, their argument is that older websites are often more established and have gone through the trust building and credibility phase. As you may know, spam websites are often registered and dumped as soon as they become useless or get sandboxed by google.

SEO experts in favor of the age benefit argument generally tend to use Google’s patent “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data”. The argument is as follows:

(1) … the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document.

(2) Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. … Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

While this might seem like it nailed the coffin, the truth is that site age is often overrated. Not that it doesn’t help influence website rankings, it’s just that it isn’t a major factor these days. What gets a website ranked properly is a combination of varying factors like the number of backlinks and one way links pointing to the website, its on-page and off-page optimization, its loading speed, size among others.

So, instead of worrying about how old your website is, you should spend more time focusing on building your website’s back links, increasing its traffic, growing its PR among others. When you do all of these, chances are that your website will even get to rank higher than an old or well established website that does not make as much effort. Just a closing advise, if the site is going to be your business site or a project with long term business opportunities, it’s better to register for a longer duration and it’d work as a “safe” tag.

Besides, with the new update in google algorithms, more emphasis is placed on real-time and recent content as against old ones.

It was just a small thought came. Coming soon with more topics.

Cheers!

Sunita Biddu

Sunita Biddu is a digital business coach and power blogging mentor helping coaches and small business owners. She helps with building a strong and profitable online presence and reputation that creates a self-sustaining business.  Sunita writes on this blog once a week about easy-to-use guides and articles about business, coaching, social media and blogging. You can grab some of her free resources and ebooks from the resources section.