Do Expired Domains Keep Their Age?

Great question, to which I am not certain the answer...

But I bet when the domain changes owners, it loses its age...

But the best reason for buying expired domains, and often the worst reason also, is that an expired domain often keeps the links it had before it died...

I believe the domain keeps it's aged. I have found myself buying domains in the past before, new domains, and found out someone had owned it at one time and the age shows its first registration.

If a domain has expired (and is deleted), then it has no "age".

There are circumstances whereby some registrars will prevent the domain from being deleted, then put it into an auction. If you were to buy it, then it would be transferred to you and you would keep that registration date (which is what you refer to as "age").

When it comes to buying domains on the aftermarket (which are currently registered), then you can see the age by looking up the whois details.

FYI: The perceived SEO benefit from an "aged domain" is a complete myth. Age is just one, minor factor when it comes to ranking.

Many years ago I wrote the "Domain Lifecycle" to explain how domains expire and are renewed. It should help clarify things.

http://www.domainerincome.com/images...ed-domains.jpg

If you have any specific questions on individual names, I'd be happy to answer them.

First of all, don't count on them ranking quicker simply because they're older. It takes more than this.

What really matters is link age, not domain age. If a domain has aged stable links it has value. Domains that have been parked and had no links built to them are essentially the same as a brand new domain.

Next, probably due to certain popular scripts that do content backloading, Google has apparently recently introduced algorithms that devalue new content structures on existing sites. If your relaunched site doesn't match up with the old content you'll drop in rankings and stay there for some time. I recently saw this with a client site, an established pro golf tournament site, who switched from static HTML to WordPress and went through a committee change that caused domain registration to change. I've also seen this effect on some of my own sites.

Now, up until this very recent change I would tell you that Google's mainstream algorithms don't pay attention to domain registration information. This was based on me seeing the deindex penalty still being applied to domains that had been through the deletion process and open for public registration. Happily, this doesn't appear to be the case now but I'm still checking into this one to make sure.

My understanding:

If you can get it before the cache of what was there expires,
you have a chance to put the site back-up, then after you've
established some apparent continuity, you change the site to
what you want.

Once the cache expires, the domain's credibility is more of a
rebuilding effort.

Go to certain forums and you'll find dozens of people asking if
anybody has any of these domains to sell.

In any case, it's good to by a dropped domain. Google usually "remember" that domain and that site. When you build your own site with that domain Googlebot will index your site very quickly.