Oct 22
I own an old domain. A great domain actually. It is DMOZ listed, 10 years old, at least 5 year old backlinks. The only downside is that its not that brandable.
And for a silly inexplicable emotional reason I did not use it all this time. It is on the travel niche, a competitive niche compared to others.
Anyway, I stripped down the old site, and set up a new WP blog, and the classic thingies:
- Revolution Blog theme
- WP cache
- Expanded pinglist and permalinks
- Nextgen Gallery, with 20 pics
- Xml sitemaps plugin, and submitted site and sitemap to Google webmaster tools
- Pingcrawl
- CForms II, it is still a business site, we need orders
- Feedburner
- TLA, because the niche pays good and TLA inlinks are as discreet as it gets
All the tricks I mentioned on a previous post basically…
I filled the site up with 20 articles on the theme, and 20 videos, utilizing the pingcrawl and putting tags so that it fires.
Then submitted a few of the articles and videos to social bookmarking sites, mainly stumble upon.
The next day, the domain was ranking #6-7 for some competitive terms. Of course, the rank will not stay that easily, but it proved to me that an old trusted domain can rank very easy with no penalties, and no red flags for quick link growth. The ranks fluctuate for 4 days now, as expected, but they are much higher than my main site that took me a year to rank.
The point is, that if you have, or can buy, an old trusted domain 7+ years old with same age links etc, use it.
Throw up 20 pages of articles, 20 pics and 20 youtubes. Dont bother that much. Just develop it a bit, and link to your main sites. And sell links on it.
If the case is different than mine, and your domain is brandable, by all means work on it. You will find yourself waaay ahead of the curve.
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Popularity: 14% [?]
written by Glowleaf
\\ tags: Blogs, old domain, trusted site
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:04 am
I wonder how much this finding can affect rankings for paid traffic. Do you think a url with the criteria listed above would rank higher in ppc results than a younger blog with the exact same content? –
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:14 am
Maybe my wording in the article was wrong…
Let me be clear. I know for a fact that older domains are way easier to rank. This was a simple example, I have many more cases where this has happened.
Google gives a good trustrank in old domains. That makes red flags fewer, rankings higher and pr higher. I assume, that it affects all aspects of the domain ranking, including the Adwords Quality Score.
(Of course, we are talking about a case where the only difference is the domain age.)
So yes, I believe domain age affects QS.
But, personally, I would not send the ppc traffic to the old domain. I would seo the old domain, and send ppc traffic for lead generation to a thin newer optimized domain. Longterm seo for the old domain is priceless.