In a very old article I read that Matt Cutts has stated in a webmaster video that domain age does not play “very much of a role” in search ranking. In addition, John Mueller himself has stated that domain age does not play a role in search rankings. While they do state it does not, this does show Google uses it in some way, at least for minimal reasons. Go to godaddy.com/whois, Type in the domain and Look up the age of the domain.
Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain
Notice until recently how Google bolded keywords that appear in a domain name? This isn’t exclusive proof that it’s used in ranking, but it makes sense that having the keyword in the domain would be a relevancy signal.
Keyword as First Word in Domain
Moz’s 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey has most SEOs placing domain-level keyword usage at a minimum influence on rankings nowadays, compared to Moz’s 2011 survey which has a very high correlation of SEOs placing domain-level keyword use at high influence on rankings. While this appears to no longer be a high-influence ranking factor, it may be worthwhile to check when creating a new site.
Domain Registration Length
Google’s patent states the following about domain registration lengths: “Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway illegitimate domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the data when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain.”
Domain History
It’s likely that a site with a volatile domain history can negatively impact your SEO efforts if you purchase that domain. When purchasing a new domain, investigate factors such as its link profile, previous owners, and previous activity.
Exact Match Domain
While in the past, having an exact match domain with the exact keyword you want to use was a heavy ranking factor, an EMD update was launched in September 2012. The intent of this update was to stop poor quality sites from obtaining higher rankings just because they had domain names that matched their primary targeted keywords. Sites that have an exact match domain but are a higher quality site will likely see a benefit from this.
Identifying Pages With Thin Content
If the site has a heavy menu like 150 words, has a heavier footer at 200 words but not much else, and there are 3,500 words of content on the page, you can generally assume that 3,150 of those words belong to the meaty article on that page. If you aren’t sure, dive deeper into the page with the Word Count extension from Google Chrome, and count how many words belong just to the meaty article.
Page Load Speed via HTML
Page speed, in recent times, has become a critical ranking factor to get right. In fact, Google’s John Mueller quite recently gave a legit number for Google’s Page Speed recommendations: He recommends that you keep your load time to less than 2-3 seconds.
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