Generally, most people use a domain age checker for SEO. Why is a domain's age so crucial to SEO?
As a refresher, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to appear higher in search results, specifically search results relevant to your website. A business that sells running shoes, for instance, would want its site to appear in search results for buying running shoes.
It's not enough to appear for these search results, though.
If you want to see results from SEO, like traffic, leads, and sales, then you need to appear on the first page of search results. For reference, the first page of results gets around 95% of search traffic. When it comes to reaching page one, you can use various tactics, including having an older domain.
So, how does domain age affect SEO?
Search engines like Google use more than 200 factors for compiling search results and ranking websites. One of those factors is domain age — indirectly, at least. Older domain names tend to have more authority than newer domain names.
That's because these domain names have history.
They've likely built a backlink profile, for example, attracting links from other reputable and authoritative websites. If a domain has a robust backlink profile, it can often rank well in search results because of its authority.
To put in perspective the value of an established backlink profile, consider the following scenario:
Your friend needs a plumber, so they call you. Since you like your friend, you want to recommend a great plumber to them. So, you give them the name of someone you know and trust vs. that plumber's place you drove by the other day.
That's similar to how backlink profiles work in SEO.
Search engines want to deliver high-quality content to users because if they don't, people will switch to another search engine. So, search engines work hard to provide the best content possible, and backlinks are an excellent way to gauge a website's reputation and track record.