Ever wonder how to find the age of any website? In order to find how long a website exists online, you should look when the domain name was registered first. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a non-profit corporation that maintains allocation of top-level and country specific domain names. There are more than two thousands companies registered with ICANN as an accredited registrar for selling domain names. The website owner needs to register the domain name with one of these accredited registrars and renew continuously to hold the ownership.

You can check the age of any domain name easily by looking into the domain’s record from the registrar. But you can also easily find the domain age with readymade domain age checker tools available online.

There are 3 different ways to check the age of any domain for free:

1. Using domain age checker tool
2. With WHOIS tool
3. Using wayback machine

Use the above free domain age checker tool, type the domain name and click submit button. You will simply get the age of the entered domain like below:

As you can see, the tool will show you the domain age in years and days along with the following three dates:

• Domain creation date – first date the domain was registered online
• Domain updated date – last date the domain record was updated with the registrar
• Domain expiry date – date which the domain will expiry

The domain creation date will help you to understand, how long a domain exists online. Even the owner transfers the domain to a new owner with another registrar, the creation date will remains same as the first registration date.

The second method to check the age of domain age is using WHOIS lookup database. Go to our free WHOIS lookup tool page, type the domain name in the search box and click on the “Get WHOIS Date” button. You will get all the details of the domain including creation date. Check the “Creation Date” section to find the date of creation of the domain.

Last option is to use internet archive. The wayback machine takes a snapshot of all the websites, that allows web crawlers not blocked by robots.txt file. Go to internet archive site and search the domain name. You will see results like below showing the number of times the page snapshot was taken between the date range. Basically you can consider the start date is nearer to the domain creation date.

Remember, this is only an approximate date as the crawler needs sometime to access the website. Also, when the owner blocks the site with robots.txt, crawler will not index the page and you will not see any snapshot in this case.

Well, did you love any sites when browsing online? Wanted to find how many years of effort spent behind that site? The simple answer to these questions is to find the age of the domain. This is an indication that the site was online for that many years.

In general, any popular site you check on the net would have been there for 5+ years. This will help to gauge the effort required to build similar sites on your own. Let us take few examples as shown below:

This is a big debate on the SEO world, people arguing that domain age is not important by showing the video clip from Matt Cutts, a former Google engineer. But we feel the context of that video is different. Probably none of us know Facebook, when facebook.com was 2 months old domain. Now that, it is 20 years old domain. There are definite differences when an author publishes article in popular sites and new sites.

For a new site owner, it is been a pain to drive traffic even with good quality content. It will take years to get the traffic for the quality content also. This is a known fact to every webmasters out there. In other words, domain age has considerable impact on your traffic.

You can also visibly check in Google that old pages have more value and reachability than new pages on the same niche. In our opinion, just like how the experience of a person is gauged with age, webpages also will get automatic domain and page authority over the period of time.

Experts also suggest the expiry date of a domain is an indication to search engines that how long the site is planned to be online. Hence, it is a good idea to register the domain name for longer time for building your website rather than extending on yearly basis. Just register for the longest possible time of 10 years, and continue focus on publishing valuable content. In this manner, your site will become popular over the period of time on search engine results pages.

As shown in the above examples, you can check out the domain age of your favorite and popular news sites to understand how long journey it takes to build a reputable website.

Buying and selling of domains is a popular business as old domains with high domain authority tends to get more visibility in search engines. Google, earlier had a PageRank mechanism of giving rank to the domains and pages. On one hand this was motivation for webmasters to improve their rank but on the other hand this was a huge business. People buy and sell domains with high PageRank and also purchase links from such websites.

Though Google discontinued PageRank, still we have domain authority tools from other search optimization firms like MOZ. When your domain has high domain authority value then the selling price would be much higher on the market. It is also easy to sell high authority domains in open marketplaces like Flippa.