Site “Age” in Rankings – The New Toolbar PageRank (in a bad way)
No, I don’t mean it’s the new “most important” component of the Google algorithm. I mean it’s the one that probably isn’t that important but causes people to OBSESS. Just like toolbar PageRank has done for years.
As always, this is personal opinion.
In the SEO world—in forums, blogs, tools, etc.—a ranking factor that is coming up more and more is age. And people are saying, almost universally, that older is better, although most confess that freshness is important in tandem (i.e. you should keep adding new content).
If you objectively consider age as a ranking element, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s better or more relevant. In fact, it could just as often be a negative attribute. When I search for Vista reviews, for example, chances are I’m not looking for a review of the first beta. I’m looking for the newest review. Sure, I could use Google news for this, but the results are limited and normal users probably don’t do that. So why would Google put weight on age? The short answer: they don’t.
Then why do all these high profile SEOs talk about it so much? It’s the age old mistake of misinterpreting correlation and causation.
When reviewing high ranking sites, of course it’s going to look like age plays a role—older sites have a head start in link building and virtually every other aspect of SEO. But just because older sites are ranking better it doesn’t mean they are doing so because of their age. Most of the time, they have more natural links, more content, etc.
I frequently hear SEOs blaming poor rankings on a site’s age. They go through their normal quick link building routine, whatever that may be, and then they don’t rank well right off the bat. Looking for something to explain their poor rankings, they say “Oh, well it’s gotta be because my site’s so new.”
It’s an easy mistake to make because it seems to obvious. But it’s wrong. You’re not ranking poorly because your site is new, per say. It’s because your site hasn’t doesn’t have enough—or good enough—links yet. If you create a new site targeting competitive keyword terms, I’m sure you could rank in the top ten very quickly; IF you were able to get links from authority sites that were relevant and natural.
To push an example to an unrealistic extreme, just for sake of argument, consider creating a new site targeting a competitive term like Search Engine Optimization. Most people would say you’re looking at YEARS of ‘age’ before you stand a chance. Well that’s probably true, but ONLY because that’s how long it would take you to get enough link / trust juice. Say this imaginary site were linked to from the Google homepage, Yahoo’s homepage, a good DMOZ category, etc. (multiply that by 1000) in just a few days. I’d be willing to bet that it would rank well in a few weeks.
If you’re thinking the example is totally screwy because this is a pretty much impossible scenario, you’re missing the point. The point is that it’s not about AGE, it’s about links.
I can specifically recall an episode of SEO Rockstars where they have Matt Cutts on as a guest. The guys discuss an experiment they conducted with their nofollow / Link Condom site. To sum up, they try to get Matt to admit the site isn’t ranking well because it’s young—and that their comparison page (on an established blog I believe) that they SEOd for the same term is ranking well because it’s on an older site—but Matt repeatedly denies this charge, surprisingly directly, citing other algorithmic elements (including some on site affiliate links).
Anyway, the main point is that if you sit around waiting for your site to age so it will rank well, you’re making a big mistake. It’s not about age. It’s about links. In my mind, saying a site is ranking well (or even better) strictly because of domain age is like saying a site is ranking well because it has high PR—after all, most sites that rank well do have higher PR, even though we know and accept that PR is not the reason for their rankings.
Thank you! …Somebody sees the bigger picture! If I had someone to say it to, I would have been saying this for a long time, now
I’ve had several brand new sites I’ve launched within the past few of years showing up pretty high in the SERPs within the first few months. At first I thought it was because I was getting inbound links from some pretty high-profile sites, but after a while I came to the same conclusion as you.
Great article! Consider it Dugg!
Awesome, thanks–glad you agree/liked the post. Hmm that’s a pretty ugly URL word press gave me for using quotation marks… oh well.
LOL! I noticed that!
By the way… your supposed to Digg your own article first …that way you can write your own insanely magnetic title and description for the world to clicky!!
Yeah, but I’m a little worried about throwing a flag by always digging my own stuff. So at least for a while or unless I have something that I really think can take off, I’ll hold off on being the first to digg seo loser articles.
All things being equal I’d rather have a site that’s got 5 years of link history built in or 10 years would be even better. Sure it’s really all about links but over time the “Filty Linking Rich” have tendency to get richer
http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Oct04/RichLinking.html
I totally agree–this is something I deal with constantly; older competitors with worse, but more established, sites. A great example is the Yahoo directory–I have a competitor with about 30 listings, all free, because his site was around before Yahoo started charging and didn’t have ads at that point. There’s definitely a first-mover advantage in SEO–my point is just that the advantage isn’t ‘age’ alone.
Domain age cooresponds to PageRank. Older sites tend to have higher PR, even sites that have been inactive for years. I’ve found old tech websites circa 1995 that are PR 7 that were last updated in the 90’s.
I would much rather have a link on an active high traffic PR 0 site started in 2006 than a PR 7 that has been stagnant for 7 years.
Domain age doesn’t actually correspond to PageRank. The two are often correlated but neither factor affects the other directly. The ONLY factor affecting a page’s pagerank is links (aside from perhaps a manual BAN, but this wouldn’t be algorithmic).
It’s like saying that “Old men have met more people than younger men.” (sorry it’s the best I could come up with
)
Well yeah, old men on average have probably met more people because they’ve been around longer and had more time to do so. It’s not that the fact that they’re old makes them meet more people in and of itself. Plus, the statement isn’t always true–some old people are really shy or antisocial (translation to SEO: don’t actively build links) and some young people are really outgoing (translation: a site building lots of links), which results in some cases where the assumption fails. Okay maybe that’s not the best analogy but I tried ;).
>Well yeah, old men on average have probably met more people because they’ve been around longer and had more time to do so.
That’s a perfect analogy!
According to “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data”, Google might be doing some kind of scoring based on a document’s “inception date” and using those dates to calculate the average age of the documents for a particular domain. Then documents are score based on the “difference between the ages of the documents and the average age.”
The patent lists several ways to determine an inception date, including registration date and the date a search engine (Google) first learns of a url.
But what are these “inception date” scores used for? They might be useful when flagging spam, or deciding the depth of crawl. But I don’t see how a url with an older inception date should rank higher than a url with a brand new inception date.
Good info, but keep in mind (you probably already know this) patents are just patents. Filing a patent doesn’t mean you have to use the technology described… in fact, patents can even be used to mislead competitors, or, god forbid, SEOs
I would have to totally agree with you on this one. I think that the way an aged site would benefit you if by having that time to acquire relevant links. A site that was created in 2001 but is not active would have the same chance as one created in 2006. Really what should be said is not that the age of your domain plays a big factor but how long your site has been active plays a big factor.
I really liked your take on this topic, you should just over to my site www.redhandstudios.com and check out some of the topics I have written on lately.
Darrell
I run a group of non-profit websites, I created a new product directory (not for selling products, just for information purposes for the non-profit audience) and made it a subdirectory of the main site (10 years old), it did pretty well, ~1300 visitors per day with only a handfull of backlinks to the subdirectory. It has a lot of content, but is a dynamic site (php)
But had trouble getting more backlinks from other non-profits, government to the subdirectory, as they already had links to the main domain. And wanted further growth, so took a brand new new domain (no previous owner). And started building quality backlinks, 301 the old directory. Backlinks are doing well and recently got a PR5 for the home page (its only 4 weeks old). But although all of the pages are indexed most are now supplemental. So now at 300 visitors per day, but all from links from other websites, nothing from google SERPs. It only appear if I use very particular keywords, basically all keywords appearing in the domain name
The domain is about 2 months old now, my question is, I feel that I have done the right thing, and how long will it take to start appearing in SERPs?
NPDC
What (just a question) if Google takes into account not the age, but some factors which grow only with age?
For example (a very simple one), G migh give points to your site in accordance to the number of people who search for words which appear on your site (and apply some king of inverted frequency correction, so that words which appear on many sites don’t count for much and vice-versa)?
The more time passes, the more points you gain. The more your pages answer search queries, the more you gain. The more your content is unique (fewer other pages with the same topic), the more you gain.
There are other factors which G could use in the algo which can only grow with time.
Just my thoughts.
Age definitely may not be the determining factor, but age is also a factor to be considered. Also incases like a new product launch, let us say, iPhone, you cannot get a site aged 5 years old that was meant for iPhone, but, Google would value an article or review from a site that has been 5 years old and is also popular.So when it is popular logically the links come into place.
I would also wish to add one more point, having a domain which is just old, necessarily need not be an advantage. Assume you have been there for 5 years and you haven’t attracted the kind of traffic you should or you haven’t attracted the backlinks, then you would be in a disadvantage against a guy who is just 5 months old and yet drawing much of traffic & links. But one advantage with being “OLD” is that you put across to the world that you are experienced & you are there on net for some serious purposes and more importantly you would have the early starters advantage.
Since there are no authorative guide books, it is all just the experience that i am sharing here……
thanks,
itispals
I guess the real test would be to have a brand new website and a 3 year old (which had no content on it so no natural back-linking over time would occur) all of a sudden have the same amount of backlinks from high-ranking site to it and similar content.
You make some interesting points in this article, but in my experience, it’s not only the links that provide the ranking weight. The age of the site itself does play a role.
I recently optimized one site that was registered in 1998 and had a long history of website changes over the years. When we started this campaign, they had zero backlinks. After optimizing the titles, tags and content and using our usual method of link building, we had this site in the #1 position for some very competitive search terms within 3 weeks.
In contrast, we just finished a campaign for a client with a brand new website and domain. We programmed the site from the ground up with SEO as our top priority. After the same link building strategies that were applied to the older site, this new site is not getting past page 4 of Google’s results and it has been 4 weeks so far. Comparing the backlinks from both sites, they are almost identical.
The older site is ranking much better for much more competitive one and two word phrases localized on a global scale (eg: ‘productname’ & ’sale productname’), whereas the newer site is going after 3 word search phrases localized to a specific city (eg: ‘cityname servicedescriptor service’).
So, since these two sites have almost identical backlinks, it can’t be because “It’s because your site hasn’t doesn’t have enough—or good enough—links yet.” As we have experienced in these specific case studies, there is something to be said about a site’s age alone.