2 year old website with no links, no content dominating local pack??

[Libkee27]

Does the age of a domain affect rankings? I have a 2 year old website that I haven't touched and its ranking in local pack for a bunch of keywords. Of course I'm excited but super confused...no backlinks and no content yet it ranks statewide for key terms. I'm working on a website that is two months old and I'm posting content regularly, I realize that it can take a few months or more to rank but this other website contradicts so much of what I've learned working in SEO for the past 10 years. Can it be simply because of the domain age? Does anyone notice this as a ranking factor in their experience? Please share any insights, think my head is exploding right now lol

 

[djbaxter]

First, domain age is not a ranking factor - and even if it were, 2 years is a very short period of time in that respect. The belief in domain name as a ranking factor is another persistent myth.

The only way that domain age can factor in at all is in terms of googlebot crawl frequency and how deep the crawl goes into your site (a new domain may take a while for googlebot to crawl all the pages) and even there the freshness of the content and other factors are far more important.

My general practice with a new site is to generate a sitemap and submit it to the Search Console to sort of jump start the process.

Google Says Domain Age Doesn't Matter For Search Rankings

Google's John Mueller responded with a resounding "no" when he was asked if domain age matters for ranking in Google's search results. John responded on Twitter to the question by simply saying "no" and adding no more detail. Here are the tweets: @_newsbulletin @methode no— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆...

www.seroundtable.com

How Much Domain Age Matter In Ranking?

I am very confused about domain age. I read many articles about domain age, some experts say domain age does matter in ranking and some experts say it doesn't matter in the ranking. Kindly guide me about domain age.

moz.com

The age of your domain impacts how well you rank in the SERPs is an SEO myth. John Mueller and Matt Cutts have said the below:

• Domain Age is not a ranking factor.
• New domains may be dampened for a few months to help fight spam.
• Old domains may positively correlate to better rankings due to other factors.

Source(s): John Mueller (April 12, 2017), Matt Cutts (Oct 26, 2016), John Mueller (Jan. 15, 2016).

 

[Libkee27]

yes and I read a recent study from Backlinko that said they did not find a correlation between domain age and rankings. wondering what attributed to the ranking, thanks!

 

[JoshuaMackens]

In my experience domain age plays a role in so far as a young site will not rank as well as it should, all things considered. My general rule is you have to wait about a year before Google takes the "reigns" off and let's you rank the way you should. Theoretically, SEO can speed up this process.

The longevity of a domain name for SEO may be oversold, but young sites under a year, from my experience with multiple sites, will be harder to rank.

I didn't read the backlinko article but I imagine they're talking about a 5 year old domain vs a 10 year old domain, etc.

With your older site, if it has no backlinks or content, I imagine it is ranking for relatively non competitive keywords. Or Google sees your entity as very strong apart from your website and may be giving it a boost because of that.

If you can share the keywords/location it will help shed some light on the situation.

I'm also interested to see other SEO's weigh in on this.