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SEO for Websites with Recently Purchased Domains
This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.
Yes, we all know the age of the domain is incredibly important for a website achieving a high search engine ranking. We have all heard it a million times before: ''That website won't perform well in the search engines, no matter how well it is optimised, because the domain is only a couple of months old." But my question is, ''How important is it? How long does one have to wait until a domain name is considered old enough for a website to start being able to make an impact in the search engine rankings for competitive keywords? 12 months? 2 years? 3 years? Does anyone have an answer?''
I expect many of you will say it depends on the other SEO variables. Yes, but imagine the following scenario. You have Website A (performing incredibly well in Google) and Website B (several pages below Website A in Google). Website B is exactly the same as website A - same number of inbound links (all of the same quality), both websites are built in the same way, both have the same number of website pages, both have the same Google Page Rank - everything is equal! The only difference is that the domain of Website A is 2 years old and the domain of Website B is only one year old.
The company I work for has 2 websites. http://www.unsworthsugden.co.uk is over 4 years old. We also have a site which is less than 6 months old (http:///ww.usdigital.co.uk). At the moment SEO for the Unsworth Sugden website is very easy. We pick the keywords we want to target and with a bit of changing of Meta data, titles and text on the page, we seem to get onto the first page of Google for most of our chosen keywords. Meanwhile, usdigital is proving very difficult. Intense use of IBP and considerable monitoring and adjusting of page text and the addition of new pages improved the usdigital site considerably in the first couple of months; however, the last 2 months are proving more challenging.
I expect many of you will say it depends on the other SEO variables. Yes, but imagine the following scenario. You have Website A (performing incredibly well in Google) and Website B (several pages below Website A in Google). Website B is exactly the same as website A - same number of inbound links (all of the same quality), both websites are built in the same way, both have the same number of website pages, both have the same Google Page Rank - everything is equal! The only difference is that the domain of Website A is 2 years old and the domain of Website B is only one year old.
The company I work for has 2 websites. http://www.unsworthsugden.co.uk is over 4 years old. We also have a site which is less than 6 months old (http:///ww.usdigital.co.uk). At the moment SEO for the Unsworth Sugden website is very easy. We pick the keywords we want to target and with a bit of changing of Meta data, titles and text on the page, we seem to get onto the first page of Google for most of our chosen keywords. Meanwhile, usdigital is proving very difficult. Intense use of IBP and considerable monitoring and adjusting of page text and the addition of new pages improved the usdigital site considerably in the first couple of months; however, the last 2 months are proving more challenging.
Have any SEO professionals written about the age of a website's domain and its effect on search engine rankings? I don't just mean "This site performs better because it’s older," but evidence that after X number of months Google will give 'x amount of weight' to its ranking, then after 'x number of months more' Google will then place x amount more of weight to the site.'
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