Posted on April 26th, 2010Simply registering a good domain name in today’s domain market can present a significant amount of challenges, especially if you are trying to find a domain name that contains commonly searched for keywords. Once you have a domain name that is suitable for your online endeavor you can begin focusing on the promotion of that domain. In some cases it can take years for a domain to obtain a high Page Rank, or authority in it’s niche. One of the reasons why it is so difficult to find good domain names is because people are simply looking for names that are not registered. This is also the reason why it takes so long to establish authority with your site.
Aged Domains and Site Authority
As a site ages it acquires backlinks from around the web, and it’s overall web presence expands, thus attracting attention from search engines and gaining a higher PR (Page Rank). Every indexed site on the internet gets a Google Page Rank, ranging from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best possible Page Rank and 0 being insignificant. The age of a domain is one of the factors that contributes to the site’s overall authority. The older and more established a site is, the higher the PR will be, and when a site has a high PR there is good chance of the pages on that site going to the top of the search engines fairly easily.
Where to Find Aged Domains
Finding aged domains online is actually fairly simple, however the prices charged for these domains vary greatly. In fact, they can cost anywhere from $5 to a quarter million or more. When it comes to purchasing aged domain names online you have two options; You can either buy them on an auction site, (which in many cases you’ll also receive content and a fully built website along with the domain), or you can buy them from registry sites that specialize in buying domains that are about to expire or have recently expired. One such site is FreshDrop. FreshDrop provides a friendly interface that lets you search through a massive database of recently expired domains in real time. Using this database you can find a plethora of information about each prospective domain, and then use this information to choose the most suitable domain for your endeavor.
How to Know What Aged Domains are Good
Assessing the value of the domain based on age alone can result in some very faulty decisions being made, especially if your intentions are to purchase a domain that will give you instant authority in the search engines. Instead, you need to focus on a variety of factors, such as PR, and most importantly backlinks. For example, at FreshDrop you can see how many Google and Yahoo backlinks are indexed for each site. A 3+ year old site with a decent amount of backlinks, a PR above 3, and a keyword optimized domain name would be the ideal aged domain to purchase.