Are you wondering whether to buy a new or aged domain? we will outline some of the pros and cons of new and aged domains followed by tips on buying aged domains of good quality for long term SEO benefits.
Firstly, aged domains may already have a high Page Rank (PR) which will increase the amount of visitors this leading to enhanced profitability or/and popularity. The reason behind this is that Google trusts more aged domains than a newly created one. The old domain may have even more value if it has some backlinks. On the other side, you may want your domain name to exactly match certain keywords that describe your goods/product/service or other. We have to say that there is a solution for that – you can use a 301 redirect to redirect from the aged domain(s) to the new or existing domain names. In most cases, the power transfers from the aged domain to the new one, even if the efficiency is 80-90% it is usually still worth it.
You should search for domain names that are in existence from at least 3 years but 5 is recommended as they will be more influential in the search engines (however, this is not always the case, there are several factors which must be regarded). For example, I found a domain name in Go Daddy auction which costs $26 and is in existence from 5 years, has more than 50,000 backlinks and has never been dropped. In a nutshell, we believe there are both pros and cons to buying old domains and which option is better depends entirely on the endeavor you are undertaking.
If you have decided to buy an old domain name, here are some tips how to select a decent one which will give you SEO benefits and will have a good rank.
Firstly, you should check whether the domain name has been dropped. Since most SEO experts would agree that the value of the domain will have decreased greatly if this has happened you should always check. Dropped domains often lose their PR, lose their influence in search engines and so on. To see whether a domain name was dropped at some point you can use www.domaintools.com . Here is a dropped domain name that I found, you can see how it looks like in domaintools:
You can see that the domain name has “2 drops” and it is definitely not a domain that I would consider buying although it is quite old.
We also suggest you to use the wayback machine to see what content was used in the website with that domain name. This can be helpful as you can conclude whether the usual visitors to that website will continue to visit it by seeing whether the former content is relevant / similar to yours. In that way, you can choose an old domain name which content is similar to yours and matches your business field so you can profit even more from the purchase of the domain name. To use the wayback machine we recommend you to go to http://archive.org/web/web.php where you can see a copy of how the website looked every single year of its existence. When you enter the website you’ll see this:
Just fill any website in the field where the cursor is and click Take Me Back. Then, you can select a year and you would be able to see a picture of that website on a random month of that year.
Another thing you might want to do before buying an aged domain is to check whether its inner pages have page ranks as well. You may find a PR 5 domain with inner pages also PR 5. If so, you can simply recreate those pages and benefit from that. All you need is SEO Quake which you can download from www.seoquake.com. The plugin is designed for Firefox and it shows numerous webpage rankings. Here is how the different Microsoft.com inner pages are ranked in Google by using the SEO Quake plugin:
You can see various details with SEO Quake such as Google pagerank (the text in the box), Google Index, Alexa rank, SEMrush rank and much more. To see whether the inner pages have ranking and what is it install SEO Quake, restart your Mozilla Firefox browser and type in Google search - site:website (site:Microsoft.com , for example) It takes less than a minute to install and it will definitely help you, so it is a must have plugin!
One more thing you need to know before buying an old domain is to check whether the page rank is valid and not forged. Forged page ranks are becoming increasingly used making it a grave problem. It occurs because some domain sellers would redirect page rank from one of their domains to another, in that way, you will see the page rank before you buy it but afterwards they would remove the page rank leaving you with page rank zero domain. To check if the page rank is valid quickly and easily use this website’s application: http://www.seomastering.com/fake-pagerank-checker.php. We believe that now you are one step closer to being ready to buy a decent domain.
You can start buying / selling domains at www.Protrada.com . It is the world’s first domain name trading platform and has many functions. It gives domain buyers and sellers advanced trading tools, domain data, bid management technology and with it you can search for domains across all the major marketplaces such as Go Daddy, Afternic, Sedo, NameJet and Snapnames. Note that Protrada bought Domainface recently which was a market leader in domain name data. It had data on more than 14 million domains and sheltered more than 52,000 members. Thus, Protrada can help you when deciding whether to buy an aged domain name and it will also help you to search for a domain which is with similar content and has a name close to your desired one.
You can also use www.registercompass.com as it has numerous features and its database is composed of domains with page rank. The website includes features such as: real traffic and visitors statistics, Google pagerank, Alexa rank, many strong backlinks, indexed pages in the major search engines, DMOZ / Yahoo Directory listing, domain history, analysis and monitoring of your own domains and much more. Another important feature is the backlinks information on each domain name you can find, registercompass will show you SEOMOZ backlinks, Google backlinks, Blekko backlinks. Hence, registercompass can also aid you in deciding whether an old domain name is worth it simply and time-efficiently.
All these tips must have aided you at least a bit in buying decent aged domains with decent page rank and SEO benefits
