How much does a domain’s age affect its ranking?

We have a question from JZ in Ohio, who asks “How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?”

My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not very much at all infact. Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrars sending around emails saying ‘did you know that Google give you a bonus in ranking if you register your site for three or more years.’  Just to clarify that’s not based on anything that we have said. The only thing that might be coming from is that we did file a pattern that basically said we could use historical data in our ranking so you could in theory look for how many years your site has been registered for. Just like you could look at the history of the site to say whether it’s high quality or low quality but we have a lot of ideas and we file a lot of patterns that doesn’t mean all of that gets used in our rankings. So I don’t want people to jump to that assumption just because there was one pattern filed in 2002 and 38 claims down somebody said well, you can look at how many years your site is registered for and to jump to the conclusion that we use that in our ranking. so my short answer is make great content don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for just because someone sending you an email that says Google does or may use that in your ranking doesn’t mean that you should automatically take that to face value. What makes the big difference is the quality of your site and the sort of links that are pointing to you or not, is my site registered for three or four years instead of one or two years.

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