Choosing Between Fresh or Old Domains
When thinking about getting a domain, it’s easy to be tempted to just grab an already existing domain due to the lack of availability thereof.
In this time and day, most of the short name domains are most-likely taken and if you’re new to domain naming, the temptation of just buying an aged domain is more very irresistible.
Mind you, people like Marc Ostrofsky made their fortune buying and selling domains during the domain rush. Single word generic domain names are most sought after because they can capture thousands of “type in” traffic. These are people who types in the domain name directly on the address bar of a browser to hopefully find a website that’s related to it.
Depending on the popularity of the niche and the “x factor” of a word, the registered domain name for it could cost you from $500 to a million dollar. Yes, it’s crazy but big companies did spend millions of dollars to get the best domains names that are related to their business.
Take “baby.com” for example. People typing in this domain name are expecting to find a site that caters baby related products. How many new mothers do you think bypass the search engines and just type in baby.com in the address bar? The answer is a lot of course! Too many that it’s enough to support a full time business without ever having to worry about SEO or any of those Google shakeups.
Of course, not all aged domain has the capacity to bring “type in” traffic to your site. Type in any single word domain and every one of them are registered! This brought along the buying and selling of “premium” two-three word domain names which does have a lot of keyword searches but this long string domain names doesn’t have as much of a marketing power as single word domains which means they have to rely on search engine traffic.
What this means is even if you have a highly searched domain, you will have to compete for search engine traffic just like the rest of us! Whether or not it’s worth considering a $5,000 domain name for your company is for you to judge.
If you own a local business and your business name is taken but you really want to get the domain for branding purposes then you don’t have that much of an option but to invest in that domain name but other than that, I don’t see any reason for going after aged multiple word domains unless if you’re after the more established pagerank considering that the domain hasn’t been used for spam before which is kind of difficult to determine.
As of now, I’m not aware of any software tool that can help you determine whether or not the aged domain you’re after has been used for spamming so the best way is to do your due diligence by manually searching for remnants of the spamming activities which most-likely must have already been cleaned up by the seller.
The problem with spam domains even if it shows a high page rank is that it will be very difficult to rank your site on Google using that domain name, that if they even consider indexing it.
That being said, it will be far better to start with a fresh domain name with no page rank whatsoever than landing with an aged “high PR” domain that came from the bad neighborhood.
