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Split testing results on aged domain

by zaco
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have recently done a split test to understand how Google ranks your site and on what terms, is it the keywords, backlinks, relevance?

Here are my results:

I registered a domain that was owned by a university that has alot of .edu genuine backlinks and regular backlinks..the site lost alot of the links after I bought it..seems like webmasters noticed it wasn't the same site, the website was PR4 and it never got dropped, it was registered in 2000.

I put some content related to the same subject and I ranked in the top 10 - 20 for very competitive keywords, my site was 1 page only.

I decided to change the content totally on the website and test it with another niche, I created a new website with 10 pages 2 months ago, as of today I noticed that my website still ranks for the older keywords, the ranking dropped but I am still in the top 10 - 20 for the keywords even tho none of the keywords are on my site

The new keywords didn't rank very well, I am ranking at page 70-100 for alot of the new keywords but they are not doing very well, I didn't do any backlinking because I wanted to see if Google ranks you for the links only.

As I am seeing I am still getting traffic from the old keywords and ranking, Google will rank you for a keyword based on the anchor text so make sure you use anchor text in your links because I have seen many links built without anchor text, I think the reason why I am still ranking is because of the sites that are linking to me and their content, the content is so relevant to the backlinks and anchor.

I didn't see any change on the pagerank, As I know it will change if Google notices that the links are not relevant to your content but I don't know when was the last PR update.

Thanks
#aged #domain #results #split
  • Profile picture of the author onSubie
    Hi

    Some excellent observations.

    Do you think ranking for the old keywords is because of the backlink text and their influence will remain?

    Or do you think it is because the old keywords are still associated with the site in Google's index and the results will disappear as the index is updated over time?

    It would be interesting to see what happens.

    Are any keywords you use in the domain name? You said you created new content on the site in a different niche.

    I think people underestimate the power of age in a domain, but how easy is it to exploit and maintain that power? It would be great to get some updates in the future if you continue to experiment.

    Mahlon
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    • Profile picture of the author zaco
      Originally Posted by onSubie View Post

      Hi

      Some excellent observations.

      Do you think ranking for the old keywords is because of the backlink text and their influence will remain?

      Or do you think it is because the old keywords are still associated with the site in Google's index and the results will disappear as the index is updated over time?

      It would be interesting to see what happens.

      EDIT: I forgot to mention that since my site was an authority kind of site, when I search for it I see 6 pages listed in the search engine, I think its called Google snippet..one thing I have noticed too is the site won't change the title, the title has the site name in it which I mentioned had nothing to do with the keywords.

      Are any keywords you use in the domain name? You said you created new content on the site in a different niche.

      I think people underestimate the power of age in a domain, but how easy is it to exploit and maintain that power? It would be great to get some updates in the future if you continue to experiment.

      Mahlon
      Hey,

      I don't think the ranking stayed because of the Google index, the site is up since 2 months and Google has all the new index as I see on the webmaster tool and from the site description so it has been 2 months and I am still on page 1 for the keywords that do not exist on my site.

      As for the domain, no non of the keywords are in the domain , its a generic domain so that won't effect the rankings, I just checked the webmaster tool and it showed me that I went up 2 positions in the first page for one of the old keywords , the webmaster shows data as of January 7th since it doesn't show instant but still I see it on that page
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  • Profile picture of the author zaco
    I forgot to mention that the site title will not change, it kept the old title even tho I have changed it and everything is indexed, the title has nothing to do with any of the new or old keywords, its the site name.

    Also since the site had good authority, when u search for it and put site.com in Google, it will list 6 pages in the results with their description.. all new pages.
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