Domain Age Advantage: does it spread to Subdomains?

Posted by Rainer on November 23rd, 2007 at 10:49am

Do you remember my test with a site related to the US greencard lottery? This site contains some real (and hopefully useful) information, but it is a two-pager, with very limited links between them. The site is targeted towards Germans, where the greencard lottery always draws some attention. Other then mentioning it here on the blog and submitting it once to digg, no promo was done.

Expectedly, when I look at Google Webmaster Tools, I do not see any traffic or stats for the site. However, when I just looked up my own web stats (awstats), I found out that the site actually received a few hits (surprise, surprise) and some of them were the result from a Google queries. Oops - results from Google SERPs? Interesting… I then did a check and used Google myself to do some queries (look at an example). And, indeed, the site appeared.

The first thing I noticed is that there are very few search results for these keywords, Google lists only 10,900, which means “nothing” in web terms. The next thing I noticed is that my poor page is on a spot above some of its big competitors. My understanding is that these have not optimized their sites for the (most probably) unusual query that I did. So, from that perspective, it looks understandable that my page shows up.

What I wonder about, however, is how quickly Google brought the site online in its index. I had expected quite a delay before it would show up at all.

My leading theory is that the age of its parent domain might be a factor in the equation. The ferientips.com domain is in use for over eleven years now and it contained good content most at the time. Recently, it was heavily outdated because I didn’t maintain it for quite a while. But the content was still solid.

It is often argued that domain age is in important factor in assigning a page’s rank (notice the fine print: I did not say “pagerank” ;)). However, most folks say that the age factor applies only to the hostname. So www.ferientips.com would have that plus, but greencard.ferientips.com would not. I personally always tended to agree to that school of thought. Now, I begin to question it. I had a similar experience with the site spacelaunch.gerhards.net. This is a high quality blog site about space launches and space in general. It gained Google attention and pagerank very quickly.

What both sites have in common is that they are subdomains of domains being in existence for a long time. So I begin to think that Google probably passes some of the “age benefit” down to subdomains of that very domain. This seems plausible, because there is also obviously is a strong relationship between two such sites. Of course, a factor is that my sites do not target heavily competitive keywords. So things may be different in that area. In any case, I’ll keep a keen eye on the development of the sites. Maybe they go to the sandbox and my thoughts were totally wrong ;).

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