Google Cozies Up To Older Sites
Patrick Gavin from TextLinkAds just posted a theory on the LinkBuildingBlog about how Google is giving preferred rankings to trusted sites which have been in existence for over three years. Such older domains have been around long enough to gain a status of being an authority based upon links built to the site over time, .edu and .gov domains referencing the site, and perhaps even the date the domain was registered.
The exact year is of course debatable and there are countless exceptions to this rule but I do agree with the general thesis: when it comes to domain names, the older the better.
In my very unscientific test I looked at two commercial searches that I track regularly. I looked at the top 10 results from each of these searches and took each of the 10 domains in the results over to Whois Source to check to see when the domains were registered. The average domain in Set A was created in 1998 and the average domain in Set B was created in 1999! The most recently created domains out of the top 10 of either search was 2003.
But does such trust by Google and other search algorithms lead to older domains taking advantage of such authority and adding pages specifically targeted towards search rankings for high valued keywords?
Gavin ponders about “this growing trend where people with old domains are adding new sub pages, building links at will to these pages without mixing anchor text or doing any ‘natural link building’ and these pages seem to be on a rocket collision course to the top of the Google SERPS.”
If Patrick’s theory on Google being into old domains is true, I’d expect publishers will begin to start reporting on the date their sites were registered and year to year Google rankings when selling older sites.