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I think this is why people are buying up aged domains like it's no tomorrow. I've also seen guys do case studies that point to similar results. It's nice to have some statistically significant data to back it up though instead of one-off case studies. Great work guys and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the series!
Thanks! We have 4 more of these in the works right now, we're hoping to push out at least one a week, maybe more. We have a post that will link to all of them located here: http://serpiq.com/blog/why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions
DChuck: What are the best methods you advise to acquire aged domains then? GoDaddy auctions? or? and once you buy them, won't they loose some of their ranking power with new content?
Well there are two main ways to go about getting aged domains if you don't have any to work with: 1) finding dropped domains via GoDaddy or others like freshdrop or 2) buying aged sites for sale either via direct buys from site owners or through a marketplace like flippa. Buying sites at flippa is the easiest way to get started as you get all the content and urls and everything, but it is usually more expensive. When buying domains only, there are a couple of approaches you can take, the main being looking in archive.org or google cache for the old content and restoring it. Then you can build from there. We're going to be doing a webinar where we'll have a guest on who uses aged domains/sites as one of his main ranking strategies. Should really illuminate a lot of these tactics.
Does this experiment factor in the backlinks profile of the domains? As we know there is a positive correlation between link quanitity (or quality) as the domain gets older, so how do we know that it is the age of the domain itself and not their backlink profile that's causing older domains to rank better?
This analysis is purely focusing on age of a domain. In future analysis posts, we'll be doing compound analysis of combined factors. We're doing our best to avoid over-asserting any given data point as there are always hundreds of factors in why a site ranks. Ultimately, we're sitting on a mountain of data that few other people in the world have access to and we want to share it so others can interpret it how they wish and apply it (or avoid it) to their campaigns where they see fit.
Great article. It validates what I have suspected for quite some time - which also happens to be common sense. An older domain will be more authoritative and of course be more likely to show up higher in the rankings.
Thanks Shawn, really appreciate it. We'll be coming out with more of these soon on a bit more interesting topics as well!
Matt Cutts has come out to say that domain age only matters if your site is 6 months or younger. I tend to believe that, this smells like correlation and not causation because of many other data points.
Sure, of course other data points factor into your overall rankings. We dropped a disclaimer in the post to explain that. In our next few posts in the series, we'll be connecting the data we're analyzing to the other major metrics to try and provide some further insights into what's going on and what influences rankings the most.
Agree, along with the age of the domain, is the age (and number) of the back-links that domain has - so there are secondary factors at play here as well. Analysis in isolation is the crux of the cause/correlation issue.