Does domain age matter?

Within the last year Google has finally gone on record to comment on the significance of a domain name's age and how it affects rankings in search engines.

The most recent instance occurred when Matt Cutts addressed this in the GoogleWebmasterHelp YouTube channel back in May:



Cutts also provided a similar glimmer of insight earlier in the year when he said:

To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling.

So, yes, we do have two recent statements wherein Google specifically touches on the issue of domain registration length and its effect on search engine rankings, but (un)surprisingly both of these responses are fairly ambiguous. He isn't specifically saying that a domain's age doesn't have an effect on search engine rankings, just that it doesn't matter all that much when you look at the big picture.

If we were to take Cutts' statements for what they are, then we can infer that a three month old domain won't have any significant or noticeable competitive handicap when compared to a one or even two-year-old domain. A number of people have come out of the woodwork to argue against this point, and we've even begun to see a number of registration companies and domain squatters who are more than happy to use a domain name's age as a selling point.

But for many of the people who have shown good returns on established domains, their sites are often tied to high-quality, well-written content, as well as established and strong in-bound links. Regardless of whether or not age plays a large role in Google's algorithm, it's very rare for a brand new domain to have all of these things associated with it at launch. It takes planning, follow-thru, and more importantly time, to pull all of these things together. So it should come as no surprise that a site that has been actively updated and maintained for a year or two would hold an advantage over a newly christened site; there just wasn't as much time or effort put into the new site.

None of the factors that go into SEO exist in a vacuum, and a good portion of optimizing a site well often involves seeing the forest for the trees. While many people within the industry can argue the merits of holding on to established domains, the focus should never be specifically centered on one aspect. Now that we have an official word on this matter, one would hope that the subject could be dropped in favor of techniques that speak more to the substantive long-term and short-term needs of a site.