Internet-Marketing.web.id

One of the many factors in Google’s search engine algorithm is the age of a domain name. Like any business, the age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity & authority and therefore a higher relevancy score in Google; people tend to trust a business that has been around for a long time over one that is brand new. The same is true for websites in the google algorithm, primarily as means to stave off the myriad of spam websites that are created for malicious purposes.

Two things that are considered in the age of a domain name are:

• The age of the website
• The length of time a domain has been registered

The age of the website is built up of how long the content has been actually on the web, how long the site has been in promotion, and even the last time content was updated. The length of time a domain has been registered is measured by not only the actual date the domain was registered, but also how long it is registered for. Some domains only register for a year at a time, while others are registered for two, five, or even ten years.

In an update to the Google algorithm a couple years ago (that SEOs call the Jagger Update), some of the big changes seen were the importance given to age; age of incoming links, age of web content, and the date the domain was registered. There were many things, in reality, that were changed in this last update, but since we’re talking about the age of a domain, we’ll only deal with those issues specifically.

One of the ways Google uses to minimize search engine spam is by giving new websites a waiting period of of xx number of months before giving it any kind of PageRank, this is also referred to as the “Sandbox Effect“.

What does this mean to you? For those of you with new websites, you may be disappointed in this news, but  don’t worry. There are some things you can do while waiting for the sandbox period to expire, such as concentrating on your backlink strategies, promoting your site through Pay-per-click, articles, RSS feeds, or in other ways. Many times, if you spend this sandbox period wisely, you’ll be ready for Google when it  does finally assign you a PageRank, and you could find yourself starting out with a great PageRank!

Even though the domain’s age is a factor, critics believe it only gets a little weight in the algorithm. Since the age of your domain is something you have no control over, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your site isn’t going to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It does mean, however, that you will have to work harder in order to build up your site popularity and concentrate on factors that you can control, link inbound links and the type of content you present on your website.

So what happens if you change your domain name? Does this mean you’re going to get a low grade with a  search engine if you have a new site? Perhaps intially. There are a few things you can do to help ensure that your site won’t get lost in the SERPs because of the age of the domain.

1. Make sure you register your domain name for the longest amount of time possible. Many registrars allow you to register a domain name for as long as five years, and some even longer. Registering your domain for a longer period of time gives an indication that your site intends to be around for a long time, and isn’t going to just disappear after a few months. This will help boost your score with regards to your domain’s age.
2. Consider registering a domain name even before you are sure you’re going to need it. We see many domains out there that even while they are registered; they don’t have a website to go with it. This could mean that the site is in development, or simply someone saw the use of that particular domain name, and wanted to snatch it up before someone else did.
3. Think about purchasing a domain name that was already pre-owned. Not only will this allow you to avoid the “sandbox effect” of a new website in Google, but it also allows you to keep whatever PageRank may have already been attributed to the domain. Be aware that most pre-owned domains with PageRank aren’t as cheaply had as a new domain, but it might be well worth it to you to invest a bit more money right at the start.
4. Keep track of you & your competitors domain age. One of the ways you can determine the age of a domain is with this handy Domain Age Tool. What it does is allows you to view the approximate age of a website on the Internet, which can be very helpful in determining what kind of edge your competitors might have over you, and even what a site might have looked like when it first started.To use it, simply type in the URL of your domain and the URLs of your competitors, and click submit. This will give you the age of the domains and other interesting information, like anything that had been cached from the site initially. This could be especially helpful if you are purchasing a pre-owned domain or considering a link exchange with another website.

Site maps are essential to get all permalinks of your site indexed by search engines. Using a standard Sitempas protocol, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! have announced support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps in your website root directory. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.

This step is very useful as webmasters can easily submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers. The search engines get information with regards to pages so index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important and search users get more fresh content.

How to modify the robots.txt file?

Simply add the sitemap url following the word sitemap like this

Sitemap: http://www.internet-marketing.web.id/sitemap.xml

(Replace internet-marketing.web.id with your own site name.)

Save & upload the file and you’re done! Its simple. Update your robots.txt file today and help search engines index your site better.

There are no quick and easy “secrets” to ranking well and driving traffic online, but it’s not rocket science either. Small businesses simply need to start with the basics, and then build on their knowledge as they go. I’d strongly recommend getting acquainted with the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it is a true road map for any business owner who has questions about how their website should be built:

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

• Design, content, and technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.