Aged domains vs branding new ones

One of the big mistakes I’ve made recently is to take some older domains and try to launch new content on them for news portals.

Even though the domains are like 3+ years old, they haven’t had much of a search history on Google. The result is that they are effectively being treated the same as new domains.

The problem is that the older domains are “branding weak” - they don’t communicate the site content and targeted theme/audience very well, and frankly were only used because I thought the older domains would offer a head start in search results.

So I may as well have simply registered brand new domain names which communicate the site better.

The bottom line is, to launch new targeted content that you want to push for human users and search engines, the following points come to mind:

1. Ensure the domain can be well branded
2. Use older domains only where the branding potential is good
3. If you have only branding weak older domains, buy a new one
4. Older domains with little search history in Google are of little value

Simply 2c. :)