OK, I wish I could roll out a simple answer but nothing about domaining seems to be all that easy really.
I have often seen (mainly in expired domain auctions) that an odd ball domain that really makes little to no sense, be at a higher value than one would expect.
Now any domain name "can" sell for what somebody may consider a "high price". I use to shake my head at that, but it’s just a fact. Any domain "can" sell for Any Price!
Example:
NoHotel.com and NoHotels.com selling for $30,000 EACH at Sedo not all that long ago.
To me, I would consider that not the best way to spend 60 grand. Considering the buyer was from Norway, I would have to assume the buyer figures a lot of people search for hotels using the acronym NO, or it was a good fit for a Norway Hotel chain instead of NorwayHotel.com or the shortened version of Norway was a good fit. Maybe they own a Telecommunication company called Noho? (Noho Tel).
The fact is, the seller had the idea of asking a much higher price then the average bear would and the interested party paid for it.
Now Nohotel and Nohotels.com (still parked btw) domains do not hold a large amount of domain age (1998), but you get my point about some domains sell for prices nobody can really explain.
As a buyer, if you see a domain that has no general clear meaning at auction and doesn’t show a sign of traffic or links in place, no keywords or ones you would consider good, you might want to check it’s creation date!
Personally, if a domain name is simply very old, but doesn’t make shit for sense, the domain age by itself doesn’t make the domain name "valuable" IMO.
Yes, even 15-24 years ago people registered what most would consider a "reg fee" domain and that doesn’t mean just because somebody paid 20 years of reg fee, means you should add that to the price you should pay with a multiplier (unless you want to that is).
So the next time you see a domain that is 15, 16, 18 or 20 years old, doesn’t automatically make the domain name worth thousands.
Clear, Easy to spell, Keyword(s), Term Popularity, Domain Extension, No Trademarks, SERP’s in place, Traffic etc are things you really should consider for your next domain purchase, not just based on creation date of the domain.
jody
Great write up. I agree with you 100%.
Scott
I think the general idea is that if a domain has been registered for 10 years, it must be good. Though this is not 100% accurate, it does help weed out names in certain situations.
For example, if you use Freshdrop.net to search on TDNAM, you can sort by domain age and get a higher percentage of decent domains. After all, if a domain really was good it’s bound to have been registered for a while.
Other than that, I’m guessing people feel it sits well with Google when you have an old domain. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I think a lot of people feel that way.
With that said, I’ve bought and sold bad domain names because they were 10 years old. I knew the domain was subpar when I bought, but I also knew people liked the age. And I still ended up selling them.
Oddly enough, I dont have the same luck selling aged keyword geodomains.
dnclips.com - Domain feeds and more
There is another reason to it. I’ve seen people checking the whois history of online stores to know how long they were in business. You can witness it yourself in some hot deal forums like fatwallet etc, where they publish the domain whois after the age. And the domain age adds a sense of security.
Kristoff Barnes
Domain age is not a significant measure of inherent value for most of my purchase decisions.
While I think there is some validity to scoring brownie points with Google (i.e. avoiding the sandbox, trust, authority, etc.), I’ve also seen domains with <1yr. of seasoning outrank established (5+ yrs. old / PR3+) sites.
I’ll take a fresh .com hand-reg with strong commercial keywords and attractive search volume, over a meaningless aged domain with zero prospects for traffic any day.
It really comes down to your intended purpose for the acquisition: resell, development, hold.
question
Very interesting thread.
Do you guys have any idea how to check if an expired domain was prior sandboxed in Google?
About the age – I think age is important only if the domain/website was online for those years.
Ex – would a domain that has been online from 1998 be more valuable than a 13 year domain that was parked from 1998?