Is website domain age important to Google ranking?

This video debunks the idea that older domains rank better in search engines like Google. It was discussed and clarified by Matt Cutts that Google, although it is a registrar, does not have the feature to determine the age of the domains available on whois data which he claimed to not have been acquired automatically. There are also several ways on determining the age of the domain but Google relies on data when it was crawled or the links of the domain are seen. Finally, he asserted that quality of content is what’s material on ranking.

The video highlights the following points:

1. Whois data is not generally available even if you are a registrar like Google. It can also vary from country code TLD like co.jp for Japan, .fi for Finland, or .in for India. Moreover, the location of whois data can be seen on different places like on the website itself or on another database. Whois data is not something that can be acquired automatically by registrars.
2. It is easier to determine the age of a domain through the identification when is the site first indexed or first crawled by Google. There are also other ways of determining the age of the domain like the date when a link of that domain was first seen or how stale the data is on that domain.
3. Most of the time, Google determines the age of domain by the time it was first crawled into or a link seen. It is much easier than looking for the whois data of that domain since a website that has been newly registered can easily be crawled into by Google thus the age can be accurate.
4. The age of the domain does not affect the ranking on search engines whether it be a six-month old domain or a really old one, it does not matter because other factors are being considered and the age of the domain is not included. Therefore, there is no reason for webmasters to worry about getting a pre-aged or decade olds domain.

In order to achieve better rankings, you should:

1. Include quality content on the site instead of obsessing how old the domain is since it will have no effect on your ranking. In the first place, these are the things that users and search engines are looking for and the age of the domain is generally immaterial to the algorithms or rankings used by Google. Furthermore, you should assure that you are adding features and contents to your site which adds high value.
2. The links taken from the high quality content on the site is also important in achieving better rankings. (You can click here to learn how to build quality backlinks.)