Does your Domain Age Affects SEO? (Especially if you bought an OLD domain)

Just posting this forum entry that I posted before in a webmasters forum.

Well, I’ve discussed a little about it on my previous post here. But one thing is clear from that post of mine: DOMAIN AGE is important in SEO.

In this post, we’ll dig in a little deeper on how and why DOMAIN AGE affects SEO.

There are TWO reasons why an OLDER DOMAIN is good for SEO and why it makes sense for GOOGLE to give credit to older domains.

1.)Well established and well known sites have older domain names, thus, it follows that older domains should be well-established and a very reliable source as well

2.)Spammers do not aim and are not interested in growing their site for the next 3 or 5 years, they drop and leave their domains whenever they like. In connection, google treat a new domain as something that is likely to be just spammed after a length of time.

Well, this belief came from the patent that GOOGLE released in 2005, “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data”

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

“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 are rarely used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when the domains expire in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.”

These paragraphs surely give you a good idea that domain age is significantly important in ranking your website on search results. 

BUT…

There are cases that a really old domain was:

1.unused or parked for a certain period of time.
2.used for illegal or illegitimate purposes for a very long period of time and was just released or sold to another owner (whitehat owner), without a change in the registration date.
3.frequently used by NEW and well established companies by the old 301 redirect from an older domain

So now, what is really the stand of DOMAIN AGE when it comes to SEO?

As I have mentioned on my earlier post, buying an OLD DOMAIN AGE will give you its linking profile as well (the backlinks established, page rank, etc). Giving you an edge in GOOGLE ranks when you are the owner of an old domain. So buying an old domain is good for SEO so far…

But, there are those OLD domains that carry POTENTIAL problems. Especially, those OLD DOMAINS that was, unless you know it, was used illegally and illegitimately before. So, buying an old domain can be more of a problem than an asset in page ranking. 

So what should you do if you are still planning to buy an old domain?

Simple, you need to check its history and make sure that it carries all the good things for SEO and not those potential problems that might give you. 

My advice?

I think it’s still better that you start your site from scratch. Buying your own NEW domain. Though the first months would really be difficult and you will never see your website on the first page results, doing extensive link building and quality content will give you a fair results in no later than a year.

This is my belief and NOT my STAND. Kindly give me your thoughts about it.