Let’s face it. SEO can take a lot of tedious work before you see results. This is especially true if you’re starting a new site on a fresh domain. Many articles have been written about the Google sandbox. Supposedly, this is the place where new sites go before they can start ranking for more competitive terms. Basically, this means your new site won’t have a lot of organic search traffic for awhile - a couple months even. That’s a lot of time to lose when you could be getting search traffic and making profit.

So, what can you do to combat the sandbox effect? Simple, buy an old domain. If you don’t have the cash, this should be one thing you should be saving up for.

Older sites have a huge advantage over newer sites. In fact, in a survey done by 37 SEO experts, the 4th most important SEO ranking factor was the age of a site. To be more specific, this factor referred “not [to] the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines.”

By buying an older site, think of all the time you would be saving. Time building links, time producing content, time looking for a domain name. At first, when I first learned about Google using age as a huge search ranking factor, I thought it was unfair. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Just like new employees have to prove themselves in a company, new sites need to prove themselves to have a spot in the SERPs.

You can use this to your advantage by “hiring” (buying) that older, well-proven employee (site). And what’s great about buying sites is there are many great deals out there. You just have to do proper research to make sure you’re buying a quality site.

Here are two things you should do before purchasing a site.

* Use our PageRank tool to see if the PageRank is not fake.

* Use our backlink checker to examine the backlinks.  Does the site have a lot of backlinks?  Are the backlinks coming from quality, high PR sites?  Also, go to the sites giving the backlinks and check to see if the backlinks are still there.

Further resources:

Aged Domains: What you need to Know
Great article. It inspired me to write this blog entry.

Terrible Web Presence Creates Opportunities
This article is more about flipping sites, but there’s also good information about buying them.

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