Does Your Website’s Age Affect Your Rankings? You Bet it DOES!!
The age of a website is one of the basic parameters contained in the algorithm of search engines such as Google. However, this works in favor of websites as they are seen to have a long life and therefore score very high in terms of relevancy, particularly with Google.
If a website lives long, it means it has something critical to offer, for which reason surfers come back to it over and over again. The two aspects of a domain name’s age are its age and how far back its domain name was registered.
The age is calculated based on when the content of the site was placed on the web and how long the site was in use and how far back the content was updated. You can tell the duration of a domain name’s registration by the date of the domain name and the tenure of its registration. You can register your domain name for just a year at the least or up to 10 years at the most.
If you’re a new website, you will be subject to a waiting period of three to four months before Google can give you a PageRank. This is called the “sandbox effect” because it’s the testing time for fly-by-night sites to get out of the scene and for the serious ones to remain. However, don’t let this disappoint you as you can use this period fruitfully to improve your RSS feeds, write articles, use back link techniques, etc to improve your page ranks.
In fact, you can help yourself have a good website with good rankings in the following ways:
• Register your domain name for the maximum tenure: If you do this, it shows that you mean business—that you intend to be there for the long haul. This gives your site a high score vis-à-vis your domain’s age.
• Register a domain name in advance: You can do this and then find a use for your new site. Perhaps later, you could sell it.
• Buy a domain name that’s in existence: A second-hand domain name makes business sense because first, you’re through with the “sandbox effect” stage. Second, you can maintain the page rank it already enjoys. However, this doesn’t mean that a second hand site comes cheap, but it’s worth the investment.
• Determine your domain’s true age: Use Domain Age Tool to find out your site’s age. From this, you can find out the edge that you enjoy vis-à-vis your rivals.
• Create a body of valuable content: To get to the top of the page ranks, only good and highly relevant content and equally good links can help you. Not only should each page of your site be informative and original but should contain different aspects of the subject matter you are dealing in. Contributing to this would be a large body of good links. Try and include links from .gov, .edu and .mil as these are not subject to sandbox filters.
• List your site with less popular keywords: By using keywords that are less popular than the ones most people are dying to be ranked on, you can find a place in the cyber sun faster than you can imagine. Have your site listed on these relatively less popular keywords than wait indefinitely to get to the top with the most popular keywords.
As a site owner, you must produce genuinely good content periodically and watch your page ranks reach the top soon enough.
Tags: Domain Aging, Domain Registration, seo, seo article writing, seo content writing, Writing Content