Search engine domain age, history, debunked

Someone asked me today; what my thoughts on domain age, history and more importantly – where a search engine (Google) pulls this information from, are.

This is a fairly important question that isn’t covered in great detail, so I will quickly dive into my theories which I have proven through domain testing over the years.

Do Google, or other search engines pull domain age from WHOIS details?

To put it simply, no. Having a history of working for a reputable domain name registrar myself and dealing with fairly low level technical problems; I can say that search engines at best have access to a complete incomplete set of root zone files. These root zone files simply list the domain name and the allocated nameservers. Some TLDs do not even give registrars root zone files.

The UK tld (.co.uk) which is run by Nominet does not provide rootzone files to registrars. In this situation a search engine must rely entirely upon natural discovery of these domains with no assistance from rootzone files (which could have been used for hints).

For a search engine to obtain full whois details they would need to engage in whois scraping. Whilst this is totally possible, it is not something a public company would even be allowed to do without proper disclosure. Even if a search engine were to engage in whois scraping (I am sure they do in black ops), they would be relying on an incomplete snapshot of rootzones and thus they would not have full data integrity.

To make matters even more difficult, some TLDs do not even record creation dates in their whois records (for an example, check any .eu domain).

A search engine cannot rely on incomplete domain sets and incomplete whois sets in order to make critical ranking decisions.

Do Google, or other search engines pull domain age from the oldest or earliest sitemap entry?

Again, no. Relying on a sitemap entry or the publisher for data would lead to plenty of blackhat techniques to game the system by simply changing publish dates.

So how does a search engine measure domain age?

Crawl date. Get your site indexed as soon as possible.

The importance of ‘rel=”nofollow”‘

Why ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ is broken

Programmers are programmers, they like rules. Adopting a trend that is supposed to stop unwanted spammy links sounds great, so it is with greater frequency that I am seeing content management systems and bits of code floating around the net that automatically add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to links.

This is bad, why? Because it dilutes the importance of ‘rel=”nofollow”‘.

If a growing percentage of new opensource software released adopts this trend, then we end up in a situation where ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ is no longer useful to search engine spiders.

Nofollow is already dead

It is my belief that ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ is infact already dead, or, at least somewhat partially diminished. It’s importance is being diluted daily by new software and misuse of the tag.

As of right now, nofollow links may not be as highly regarded as “dofollow” links; however the disparity between them both is not as great as most people are lead to believe.

Do I target ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ links and ‘dofollow’ links in my search marketing campaign?

Of-course you should, I would think it is unwise not to. If we end up in a situation where ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ is disregarded entirely, then your “dofollow” links are no longer an advantage point.