The age of a domain, or how far ahead it has been renewed, does not contribute to SEO as seriously as people think. (there is a small contribution, of course) On this subject every SEO article stresses the importance of domain age, but the situation is not that simple. I have advised companies that were thinking of renewing their domains for serious stretches like 10 years. It was clear they had reached that conclusion from information picked up in the articles they had read about SEO.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team at the time, cleared the subject up on his own blog. In short, what he said was “that domain age matters, but it does not matter all that much.”
As you can tell from that, the criteria around domain age matter as a package. Information such as the age of the domain, the owner of the domain and the country of that owner all play a part. Looking briefly at the reasons:
Domain Age and SEO
We have covered the new marketing strategy inside inbound marketing. Inbound marketing, a trend since 2013, is holding on to its effectiveness. For SEO, domain age matters because it says how important the project is and how much importance its owner attaches to it. Beyond that, no contribution to SEO is visible.
The Domain Owner and SEO
The name that appears in the domain owner field of the Whois record does contribute to SEO. The view taken of a domain owner who has produced successful work before is not the same as the view taken of somebody just starting out. For that reason Google also looks at the “domain owner” field in the Whois record. These parts, as I said earlier, work as a package.
The Domain Owner's Address and SEO
If the domain owner's address in Whois is in Italy while the site is in Turkish, that creates some difficulties, very small ones, mostly during the launch period of the site. We know it looks at this part too. But these features do not let it reach a decision about the site in general terms.
In the same way, a domain name carrying the “.tr” extension also makes it easier to place well in Google's Turkish results. The same holds for every other country.
The Domain Age Myth in Summary
We need to say that the effect of domain age on SEO is, precisely, the stuff of myth. Renewing a domain for a stretch like 10 years definitely does not affect SEO as much as people think. Matt himself said the subject is not as influential as people believe, and that the fundamental elements are the points we covered under inbound marketing.
- Unique, high quality content
- the amount of content
- External backlinks to your content
We reached some of what we learned on this subject from the video above. You can watch it on the Google Webmasters YouTube channel.
