Someone on X (formerly Twitter) asked if domain age affected search rankings. Google’s John Mueller sets the record straight.
The person asking the question he tweeted:
“Does the age of a domain name affect Google search rankings?”
SEOs have long noticed that older domain names correlate with higher rankings.
But correlations are generally a poor basis for understanding the world.
For examplethe number of computer science PhDs awarded in the United States correlates exactly with video game arcade revenue.
What Google’s John Mueller said about domain age
John Mueller of Google he tweeted:
“Mainly the ones who want to sell you old domains :-)”
And if that’s too ambiguous for some people, Mueller has tweeted earlier:
“No, the age of the domain doesn’t help at all.”
Why Do SEOs Think Domain Age Matters?
SEOs have believed for almost twenty years that the age of the domain matters, that it was even an important ranking factor.
The idea may have evolved from a patent that Google filed Information recovery from historical data.
The patent mentioned domains in the context of historical data. But the patent didn’t really say what SEOs were thinking. His reading of this patent was 100% incorrect.
The patent has an entire section titled Domain Related Information where domain related information is used to identify spam sites.
Identifying spam sites is not the same as giving bonus points if a domain has been registered for a long time.
The patent says it uses domain data to capture disposable domain names used by spammers:
“People trying to trick search engines (spam) often use use domains or ‘doorways’ and try to get as much traffic as possible before they get caught.
Information regarding the legitimacy of domains can be used by the search engine to score documents associated with those domains.”
He goes on to say that normal sites tend to have domains that are registered for a long period of time, which is not the case with usable domains.
This is where SEOs misread the patent. This information is not used to rank “legitimate” domains. Log data is used to find spam sites.
This is what it says:
“Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while gateway (illegitimate) domains are rarely used for more than a year. Therefore, the date a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor to predict the legitimacy of a domain and thus the documents associated with it.”
This statement is in the context of identifying “illegitimate” domains. There is nothing about promoting legitimate domains, just to identify spam domains, that’s the context.
SEOs have a long history of seeing what they want to see. But it is very clear that domain history information is used to find spam, not to generate a ranking signal.
This same section discusses using DNS history information to identify spam sites:
“By analyzing this data over time for a domain, illegitimate domains can be identified.
…a list of poorly known contact information, name servers, and/or IP addresses can be identified, stored, and used to predict the legitimacy of a domain…”
Finally, the patent says that the novelty of a nameserver is not necessarily a bad thing, but that the novelty of the nameserver data AND other data points together could mean that the domain is spam.
“The newness of a nameserver may not automatically be a negative factor in determining the legitimacy of the associated domain, but in combination with other factors, such as those described here, it could be.”
Microsoft filed a similar patent from 2006 which discusses the use of backlink domain age to identify spam sites.
The “background” section of this patent reveals that the purpose of the patent is to find spam sites. The patent was created because the cost of domain registrations became cheaper (they used to cost about $70/year in the late 1990s).
The patent says:
“Spammers often take advantage of these offers using a spam technique known as web farming. In particular, spammers buy or otherwise obtain a large number of sites and link the sites to each other to increase the site ranking by artificially increasing the number of contributing domains for some or all sites.”
John Mueller is telling the truth. Domain age is not used for ranking. There is no patent that suggests such a thing.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Just dance
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