Aged Domain or Exact Match Keyword Domain - What's More Powerful?

Hi Barry,

That depends on a variety of factors, mainly the quality of the aged domain you're looking at getting.

An ideal aged domain has the following:
- At least 2 years old
- High PR (not faked)
- Indexed in Google
- A number of high quality backlinks
- A good history (ie. no drops, no shady information on it previously)
- And finally.... keyword relevance.

Now, understandably you can't get an exact match aged domain for the keyword you're looking for... otherwise there would be no comparison. I would make sure though that any aged domain you are looking to get has at least some relevance for the term you are looking to rank for.

The bonus of an aged domain is it already has authority in Google's eyes, so you can build serious backlinks right off the bat without worry about raising any red flags, and doing so with your keyword as anchor text will certainly help the domain rank much quicker. Do a search for 'click here' in Google, and you'll see Adobe comes up. It is in NO way optimized for that term, but that's how most people link to it. So linking using your keyword will certainly be able to rank a domain without any keywords in it.

Also, consider the following. Matt Cutts has recently announced that Google is looking into whether or not it is going to continue valuing the exact match domain as much as it currently does. In my opinion, and many others whom I respect, Google will eventually not be weighting this factor as much.

I hope that gives you some things to consider.

Cheers,
Carney

If you will be building back links, then i suggest the domain with exact match keywords.
The only good thing about the aged domain is that it will gain 'trust' faster from google but it will be equally hard to rank it.

On the other hand a brand new domain with exact match keyword will be easy to rank, but it will time to get the google trust factory.
But if i were you i would go with the exact match keyword - as long as you are willing to build links to it and promote it[not aggressively as that is bad as well]