Does Your Domain Age Affect Domain Authority?

Breaking down SEO myths as we learn about them. Let's go!!

Author

Shoaib Ahmed
July 25, 2024

Priyanka runs ProductLogz 

It’s a pretty nifty startup that helps customers use in-app surveys to collect feedback.

She also used to run Mezchip - a chatbot for eCommerce platforms.

She had a simple question:

Mezchip has a Domain Authority of 22. ProductLogz has 14

Mezchip has far fewer backlinks than ProductLogz, but it has been around longer.

So, is time a factor in higher DA? Let’s get right into it

For your reference:

  • Domain Age: How long a particular domain has been alive on the internet. Does not need to be tied to a website.

  • Domain Authority (DA): This refers to how strong your website is in the eyes of Search Engines like Google. Higher the DA, higher the probability of your articles showing up on the first page.

  • Domain Ranking (DR): Refers to how strong your website is with respect to its backlinks. Greater the number of quality backlinks to your site, higher the DR.

  • Backlinks: Refers to the count of websites linking or referencing back to you. Say you made a viral post, and it gets attention from major media channels, they all cite the source back to you, which means they’re all linking back to you (a backlink)

Simple math: If you have a good number of healthy backlinks to your site, your DR improves. If your DR improves, your DA increases, and so do your chances of ranking higher for your keywords.

Now, on to solving Priyanka’s concern.

Priyanka states that Mezchip has been around longer than Productlogz, which seems to be true.

But from what we know about Google’s SEO policies and ranking factors, Domain Age does not affect your rankings.

HOWEVER…..

Your Domain History might play a role in your website’s current rankings.

Domain History: Reflects all the activity your predecessors that owned the same domain might have done with the domain.

Say for instance you own bonebros.com - now you might go all Charles Boyle and say this is just the perfect domain for your healthy-muscle-drink startup (I don’t know the terms)

But someone might have owned the domain before you and used it as a dating site for gay gym dudes (again, I do not know the terms)

Google will take into account the activity that went down on bonebros.com (good and bad), and base your DA off of that as well.

Take a look at Mezchip

While Ahrefs gives us one picture, if you use WhoIS to check the activity on the domain:

You can see that there’s been a ton of activity on the domain previously.

Productlogz on the other hand:

There’s been no activity on the domain, EVER. And that does play into your rankings a bit.

But is it a bad thing?

Prodcutlogz is gaining traction, and although it’s only ranking for a lot of low volume keywords at the moment, with time and the right effort, it is sure to get there.

Priyanka’s doing a really good job at organically promoting the product so you’re seeing good traction on the website, with backlinks following suit too.

Having a new domain doesn’t affect her metrics by that much, so I wouldn’t sweat too much about it, and just keep pushing on more helpful content to get that backlink profile built up.

There is another little hack you can try in case you want big upticks in your traffic and fast: buying high ranking domains

But that’s a totally different monster, and a story for another day :)

Got another SEO question? Let me know!!!

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