Age of web site

Overview

The age of the website has been a ranking fact for many years and with the recent change of direction of Google, this would appear to becoming a more important factor again.

The importance of the age of websites

Google has always looked at ways to quantify the quality of information on every website it visits.

The phrase ‘content is king’ is well known and it is for this reason Google places great deal of time and resources working out which sites information are the most accurate for the search terms people use to search on.

Over the last decade the cost of domains and the hosting has become cheaper, and for those with no money there are options which allow for free webpages.

A more recent trend off the back of this direction has been the blog for money generation. In short you can get paid for placing adverts on your blog or website.

With thousands of new domains being registered on a daily basis, it is easy to see why Google wants to ‘sandbox’ new domains until it can be confident that the site adds real value to its search.

It is for this reason Google is likely to trust an older domain over a younger one. This is not the only factor but enough of one for old domains being sold for many times their material worth.

With Google looking to reduce the impact of lower quality inbound links, owning an old domain will become more of a criteria going forward.

Google proof your search engine optimisation for Anchor text

While it is true that no one outside of Google knows the mechanism for determining rank in its search engine listing, we do know Google likes the top ten pages for a given phrase for a reason, and it is this fact we can use to formulate our strategy.

The reason for looking at the top ten as a whole is that it allows us to remove the ‘freak’ results of any one website.

Age of web sites for the phrase PlayStation 3 games on 6th December 2012 on Google UK

We could look at any phrase but it makes sense to look at a popular term. It’s also important to note that the internet is a fluid place and analysis on one day and with one search engine can be different on another day on another engine.

Looking at the top ten sites for this phrase the range of sites date from 1994 through to 2011, although the majority were either registered in 1994 / 1995 proving this is now a very powerful ranking consideration.

Affecting high completion sites over any others, considering the age of your domain in search engine optimisation could be a very important factor.

In pure money terms it could be financially cheaper to buy an old domain which match you ideal search terms over paying in time and resources promoting a new one….