SEOTipADay.com

Domain age is one of the factors for SEO success. Domain age might not be the most crucial factor but all equal, it does matter how old your domain is. Basically, domains are like wine – the older, the better.

That is why sometimes you will want to register a domain early. You might still have no content, but if you already know your niche, more or less have an idea what your site will be about, and you already know your keywords and you can register the domain for your site. (Of course, when choosing the domain name, don’t forget to include your keywords in it if available.).

Then you park your newly registered domain and you concentrate on content development. Don’t worry that your domain is registered but your site is not launched yet – more or less this is becoming a normal practice as far as new sites (and domains) are concerned.

In a sense, when you register your domain name early, you give it time to ripe. You might need 3 or 6 or more months to prepare your content and launch your site and during this period your domain name will be getting older and older. When you are ready to launch your site, you already have the advantages an aged domain offers.

However, sometimes you don’t have the time to start with a new domain from scratch and wait it to get aged. In such cases you can consider buying an already registered domain name (maybe even with the site itself). One of the most practical advantages of buying an aged domain is that you will spare yourself the sandbox effect. If you are buying the domain together with the site, chances are that you will get a lot of backlinks, which is also precious.

There are special sites where aged domains for sale are listed. Many forums for webmasters have sections for buying and selling of aged domains. Some domain name registrars also have sections with old domains for sale but generally the choice there is much limited. Anyway, if you are really serious about buying an aged domain, offers are abundant.

When buying an aged domain, one of the things you need to check for yourself is its age. Nobody says that the owner of the domain for sale is a liar but you need to make sure that the domain is as old as you are told it is. There are many tools you can use to check domain age and they can give you different information.

One of the most popular tools for checking the age of a domain is the Search Engine Genie tool.  The tool is simple to use – you enter the domain name you are interested in, press Submit and you get a screen similar to the one below:

After you have checked that the domain you plan to buy is old enough, the next step is to check if it is a good one – you don’t want to buy banned domain, do you? As with domain age, there are many tools you can use to make the check. For instance, the iWebTool tool will show you if a domain is banned in Google or not:

If the check is OK, you can proceed and discuss with the owner the additional details of the deal.

If you are still wanting to learn more about the history of an old domain then you should also check archive.org. You can sometimes go back years and years to find more information about an old domain which they have have a history of over 150 billion pages and most of the time you can figure out what it used to be. Here is a snapshot of yahoo.com back in 1996: