Jan 10th, 2007
Does the Age of your website matter to the Search Engines?
I have a lot of people come to me with a brand new site or no site at all who are asking for search engine optimization. They are certainly on the right track (looking for SEO), but a problem arises when these people expect to show up #1 in the search results within a week. The fact is, search engines do look at how long a site has been online. It’s only a small factor in their complex algorithms, but it is a factor. Why? Because there are hundreds of thousands of brand new sites being born every day and only a small percentage of those sites make it past a year of life. An even smaller percentage of those are even worth indexing to the search engines. Even if your site is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you are still in that mix of new sites.
So, How do you battle this?
There are a couple of ideas out there on how to make a new site show up regardless of it’s age. One is to go and buy an old site that has been indexed in the search engines and maybe even has a few links to it. But be careful with this because some people are selling their domain names because they are blacklisted by the search engines. If your domain name means a lot to you however, you can go with another idea: buy the domain name for a few years in advance. Supposedly, this says to the search engines that you are going to stick around for a while. Remember that both of these ideas are simply ideas right now. There hasn’t been enough testing to know if this really makes that big of a difference.
I must also say that I have had a few clients come to me with this dilemma (a new site or no site at all) and after some high quality SEO work (thanks to yours truly) they showed up for their keywords very quickly - I’m talking a matter of weeks.
So, the conclusion to this post is YES it matters…Sometimes….A little.