Domain Age Checking
Domain Age Checking Checking the age of a domain. This is a very simple task and may shed light on why your competitors are doing so well. It’s also a way to learn if someone may have had the domain you now own, before you bought it. This can help you understand things if you feel you’re being penalized in the rankings. If the previous owner spammed the engines, the domain may have been penalized or blacklisted. Just because YOU had the brainstorm and thought up the URL doesn’t mean you were the FIRST to think it up. Oh no. Many domains were bought and dumped for many reasons. In some cases, the original owner simply did nothing with the domain and didn’t want to renew his/her ownership rights. Whatever the reasons, don’t assume YOU were the first person to think up a unique URL – if it’s mainstream in any vertical (such as a popular saying), you finding it available is mostly luck, not ingenuity. So, you don’t care – right? You’re just happy it’s available – great! Let’s get to looking into how to determine it’s age. This kick-ass tool will allow you to compare ages of multiple domains, or just look for one at a time, it’s up to you: www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php Now, sometimes it’ll return results, sometimes it’ll say no results are available. If the domain is, in fact, brand new and never been used/registered before, you’ll get the “No Results” message. You’ll get this same message if the system is down or times out, too, so check it a couple of times to be sure. If the system finds results, though, you’ll see something like this: No. Domain Name Age 1 mydomain.com 5 years 5 months old Like many tools online, this data should be taken at face value. It might not be the most up to date data, but it’ll give you an idea of the age of a domain. It won’t tell you how many owners there have been for a domain, but you know when you registered your domain, so if you’ve had it for a year, and it’s age is shown as 6 years, someone else had it before you. In that case, you owe yourself a trip to the WayBackMachine to see what you can see. www.archive.org/ Archive.org has about 55 billion web pages it houses. These are old versions of websites and this resource can help you determine what a domain may have been used for in the past. Be warned, though – this resource doesn’t always have the most up-to-date data available. It’s just one more place to try and dig up some info on your domain should you need to.
