Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Stone Bridge with Angel Statues.
There is a very convenient piece of SEO folklore that says an old domain is automatically more valuable because Google trusts it more. Convenient, particularly, for the person trying to sell you the old domain.
I call this Big Domain, which is not an actual organisation, before somebody emails me. It is the very real business of making an unused address sound as though it has spent fourteen years quietly accumulating wisdom.
A domain is the address people have to remember, type and share. There can be good reasons to pay for a particular one. I would just like the reason to survive a bit more examination than the year it was registered.
What happened during those years?
A site that has been operating for years may have useful content, genuine links, recognition and people who come back to it. Those are things to investigate. The age printed on a domain record doesn’t tell you whether any of them exist.
If the address belonged to a real business you are acquiring, there may be continuity worth preserving. If it spent most of its life parked, its birthday gives you very little to work with. If somebody used it for spam, you may be buying a cleanup project along with the name.
I would look at what the domain was used for, whether the previous subject has anything to do with the new one, and why anybody linked to it. A list of links is not enough. Open some of the pages. Work out what they were referring to and whether that reference would still make sense after the purchase.
History can contain useful work, abandoned work or somebody else’s mess. Treating all three as “aged authority” makes the sales conversation easier and the actual decision worse.
Please choose a name people can use
Keywords in a domain can tell a person what the business does. That can be useful. It doesn’t mean you need to build a brand called Best-Cheap-Plumber-Gold-Coast just to give search a fighting chance of understanding the site.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide advises choosing a name that suits the business and explains that keywords in the domain or URL path alone have little ranking effect beyond their appearance in breadcrumbs. I would put far more effort into whether someone can remember the name and find the business again.
Please do not call it Wwwizkid95. You will say it over the phone, print it on things, put it in email addresses and expect customers to spell it.
A short, clear name may be worth paying for because it helps with those jobs. That is a much more useful commercial argument than expecting the domain to rank weak pages by itself.
Make sure you actually control it
Before paying for years of registration, make sure the domain is registered to the business and you can get into the account. Check who receives the renewal notices. Losing the address because an email went to someone who left three years ago would be a fairly stupid way to undo all that work.
Then get on with the website. Explain what you do, build pages people need, and make the site usable. You can spend a surprising amount of time optimising the purchase of an address while avoiding the work that needs to happen at it.
If you’re choosing a domain or taking over a website, The Big Book of SEO on Ephemera goes through the checks in more detail. Buy it before paying a premium for an old address. You may find a much better use for the money.