I don't really think Google now gives high weight-age to domain age. Had been they so, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, etc would not have good SERP. Instead what I think is the popularity and traffic of website that really matters. People always measure the popularity in terms of PR. This is again myth because Google webmaster does not think so. They are of the opinion of not thinking too much about PR. In a fast changing Google's algorithms inclined more towards universal search, being rigid over the PR as a strong measuring tool for your website shows an outdated thought.
I reiterate that domain age as ranking factor is just a hype made by people who are into domain buying and selling business. To make sure their business will run smoothly and there remain many buyers and sellers, they have promoted this and have populated articles, blogs, etc across various websites with such misleading opinion.
Someone argues that domain age does matter because Google considers this as a measuring tool to authenticate a web site. Longer be the domain age registration, higher trust value Google assigns to such site to avoid SPAMMING sites which are booked for a short time. This is hype and unfortunately many SEO firms have begun believing this.
I don't know about couple of years back whether Google was giving weight-age to domain age or not, but my observation says NO. Google seems to have dropped this in its algorithm.
I often hear that many SEOs argue that the age of a domain has its impact on their rankings. This is not true - Seriously!
The line of thinking here is Google looks at domain registrations (they do) and they use what they find to influence rankings (they likely do.) They believe Google considers the length of time your domain is registered for as a sign of how serious you are about your business. I mean many believe you will rank better if you register your domain name for 4, 5 or even 10 years rather than for a year at a time.
These SEO folks believe Google emphasizes more on longer registrations because the giant search engine perceives a shorter registration period as a sign of a company who operates with throw away domains. They think spammers who are registering throw-away domains aren't going to pay for more than one year's registration, so Google lends more credibility to those who do.
While I have no definitive proof that Google doesn't consider length of domain registration as part of their algorithm, rather I use my intuition to explain my observation why it would be a silliest thing for them to consider when it comes to determining rankings.
As people behind search engine algorithm gain more and more ability to tailor the algorithms, their ultimate goal is to help the search engines make choices the way that people do. And I again reiterate the fact that search engine is going more semantic these days. Signs have already begun appearing.
Google only hints at a few factors that are advisable for better SERP. SEO is not rocket science rather it's an experiment and analysis. The whole paradigm of SEO in web 1.0 (institutional library indexation as Search Engine would view) is taking a shift to Social Engine Optimization - SEO (community's participation on websites) because horizontal search's popularity is getting down over vertical search engines. That's why Google, in order to display unbiased search results, is going universal including the popularity of vertical results. And these days we talk a lot that Google is frequently changing its algorithm.
As said above, SEO is an analysis and is an experiment what works or what not on the basis of our general understanding and testing some of the results. The analysis and experiment is quantitative. Ninety percent of the time, we use our common sense, statistics, experiments, analysis while optimizing a web site.
Indeed, we need to ask ourselves if domain age is a good indicator of a quality site!
As a human being, all of us will be keen to know about how long a company has been doing business over the years rather than how old a company is. Not necessarily a company old enough may be doing a good business compared to a company with relatively newer one and vice versa. As a student of management I have seen how NIRMA which was popular in 80s is not popular today. Does anyone buy NIRMA just because it's an old product given to us various new substitutes?
Today, consumers are smart and intelligent. A consumer like me will be interested in knowing how much companies have grown over the years and have expanded to meet growing customer demand. Applying this to online, this refers to new content and new offerings. Consumers today are interested in the word of mouth (WOM) recommendations they might hear from friends, peers, colleagues, and relatives. For a website, this translates positive customer reviews and bookmarking, recommendations. However, those who still care for Google's PR despite the fact that it's loosing its ground, just for personal satisfaction, must believe now that PR these days depends on PR (People's Recommendation what I call WOM).
How many times have you as a customer found yourself browsing through a company's domain registration or age to make sure they own their domain for at least 3-5 years, you'll buy the product and services? I think NONE of US.
If not, then why should Google care?
Domain registration comes very cheap these days. If I book a domain for xyz.com for a period of 10 years to gain rankings, will Google really care? Can't SPAMMERS book for the same?
True, people generally book domain for longer period for doing serious business so that they might not loose the domain name. People don't register domain for rankings but for their own convenience. Has Logix really booked the domain for ranking purpose?
Registering a domain for a longer period of time because many think it will help them improve their rankings seems hard stuff to digest.
If still not convinced, book a domain for 10 years, it's cheap now days. Will search engine like Google start giving a better raking to your website? If yes, try and dare for the sake of rankings!
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