Like a fine red wine or those funky unpasteurized runny cheeses I used to love when I lived in England – a good domain only gets better with age. Operative word there being “good”. If you’ve been naughty in the past, and your domain has been previously flagged by bots as disingenuous, spammy or black hat – your website could be written in a version of HTML that predates sandskrit and still be 7 pages deep for your MVKs.

So if your “good” site predates that of a competitor – where the level of quality and fundamental SEO considerations between the two are equal – it will have a ranking advantage. Especially if we’re talking about years as opposed to months. Actually, your older site could have less content, sparser keyword density and fewer incoming links and still enjoy a higher ranking, at least for a while. And there doesn’t even have to be a site there at all. Even registering a domain without populating it has been shown to provide an advantage. I am speaking from experience – a website I readily admit kind of sucks ranks highly in Google for very competitive keywords. I credit this not to a ritual goat sacrifice (we live and learn in SEO) but because I registered it in 2001.

While age is only one of the many factors taken into account by search engine algorithms, it’s an important element that indeed makes a positive difference. Google is more likely to give the trustworthy old-timer the benefit of the doubt before listening to the whippersnappers. Always take domain age into consideration if buying or valuing a ‘used’ site. There are dozens of free tools that can do this for you in one click. And be sure to check the number of indexed pages to see if you smell a penalization rat. If you buy an old domain that has a bad bot reputation remember – there’s no lemon law for URLs.