Domain Age
Checker

Domain age is the age of domain — or how long that domain has existed since its creation.

A domain created in 2000, for example, will be 10 years old in 2010 and 20 years old in 2020. Even if multiple people own a domain over time, the domain’s age will remain the same — it won’t reset with each new owner.

Domain age matters (mostly) because of SEO. Businesses, however, can also reference domain age when looking to purchase a domain. A company that wants to buy an established domain name, for instance, may look at domain age as a part of their research and as a pricing factor.

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.

While older domain names can offer some SEO benefits, they're not always better than newer ones.

That's because domain names can have a good history or a bad history.

Not everyone that purchases a domain name has good intentions.

Back in the early days of SEO, for example, people would buy domain names and turn them into link farms, which was a spammy way to build backlinks — a later algorithm update made this practice obsolete.

From Google's perspective, these domain names aren't authoritative or trustworthy. While you can nurture an untrustworthy domain name into a trusted one, it's a time-intensive process and does extend the turnaround for getting SEO results.

That's why there isn't a right answer when it comes to choosing an older domain over a newer one.

If you want to increase your domain's authority for SEO, you can try out a sister tool to our domain age checker: SEO Checker. SEO Checker will analyze both your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO so you can get a complete assessment of your SEO and how to improve it.

Some general strategies for increasing domain authority, however, are:

1. Write helpful content that your audience will use — and optimize it for SEO
2. Promote your content by sharing it through social media and forwarding it to related blogs
3. Publish guest blog posts on websites that your target audience uses

Building domain authority is one of the most challenging parts of SEO.

It's one of the most influential, however, when it comes to ranking on search engines like Google. That's why investing the time to optimize your domain authority is essential, whether you have a younger or older domain name.