How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?

What people said

Cites Su' · 2012-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Competing against the same business name in search results”

I know you said the client doesn't want to get lawyers involved, but um, your client needs to get a lawyer involved. An SEO slap fight just isn't going to fix this, and if it's the route they want to go then they don't get to complain about promotions sending business to the competitor since that's kind of the core of the entire problem . Everything from here down is not any form of legal advice but rather some possible things to consider when talking to a lawyer. My client owns the legal business entities but unfortunately the other partner has the server/domain details. I read the above as that your client has the rights to CompanyName. Presumably that also means any trademarks associated

Cites Su' · 2012-11 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Does the period of hosting impact website rankings on search engines?”

[Assuming what you're actually asking about is the age of the domain and not hosting:] Here's Matt Cutts: How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking? [this video] . The short version is that domain age doesn't get measured directly but more as a sort of function of actually becoming "part of" the web, ie. getting links. Also, it's not very important, so don't worry about it. As far as minimum period, you're never going to get a number from Google. After buyding your domain, throw up a holding page with some basic information as soon as possible, and maybe get a few links to it if you can. By the time you're ready to launch, it'll have existed and been indexed for a few

Cites michaelcgorman · 2012-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Website Registration Date”

If the domain was expired and you purchased it from a registrar, rather than transferring ownership directly from the old registrant, then the creation date would be reset. That said, there might still be links to it from other places on the web, which is more important in terms of Pagerank. Matt Cutts, Google's head of web spam, answered the SEO question a while back in a YouTube video [this video] . Short answer: don't worry about the creation date listed in the WHOIS data.

Cites Chris Rutherfurd · 2017-03 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Google's 200 ranking factors”

A lot of good answers above but as times change so to do the ranking signals used by Google. Some signals gets devalued, other signals increase, and still others are either added or removed. Here is a list from November 2016 which has been compiled through SEO sources, Google information, etc. Some have been proven, some are controversial, and others are speculation... Domain Name Confirmed Google's Matt Cutts has gone public implying that domain age, while not a very important signal, is used by Google to some extent. [this video] Top Level Domain Keyword Appearance Unverified This doesn't give as much of a boost as it used to however having your sites main keyword in the domain name can still a

Critical Darryl Hein · 2010-11 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “What are the best ways to improve a site's position in Google?”

Google doesn't think this is really important: [this video] Yes, it's a factor, but it's definitely not something people should be concerned about.