Earlier, we had already talked about incoming links, keywords, anchor text, title text and body text. So now, we move on to the critical and active evaluation and determination of the domain. First and foremost, to know the preferences for older domains, Google is the most reliable medium. In fact, the easiest way to check out the dates for domain registration is through a whois service that is provided by Network Solutions: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
You just need to enter the domain name into the form and click 'Search', then look for 'Creation Date' or 'Record Created On'. Following our example, we observed that Realtor.com was registered on September 14th, 1995. As far as domains are concerned, the older they are, the more value they hold in terms of attaining high rankings. In this competitive keyword search category, this age of domain will act out as another great contributing factor to Realtor.com's ability of ranking exclusively.
Certainly, an old registration domain is not enough! The date on which the search engine found the page, is what matters in terms of rankings. If a domain has been registered for years but has never been brought online, then it has failed to earn any age equity sufficiently. The important part is that a search engine should have indexed the domain for a decent amount of time. Along with this, another crucial part is that it has some really old quality links which have been with it all the time.
Are you really aware of the particular time, at which the site not only has been online, but also has been indexed by the engine for the first time? If not then you can use the tool called Wayback Machine from the below link: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
The Wayback Machine is a program of archiving web pages on the internet since 1996. It's an amazing way to reveal the exact time of a page being online. (You may also have fun observing what certain pages looked like long ago on the World Wide Web.)
If you search for Realtor.com then you can even see the earliest pages from January 9th, 1997. The fact is Realtor.com was certainly online before this time but the Wayback Machine's records don't go back much further than that.
Lastly, you can even note what other domains are hosted by your competitors on the same server. This can be easily done through a tool named Reverse IP lookup, which can be found at: http://whois.webhosting.info/
In any case, if the site has used its own unique and dedicated IP address then you can see the site itself. But there are many businesses that still pile multitude of sites on a single IP address to make it quite easy for tools like this for the publicity of their networking sites.
In general, this wouldn't be problematic until and unless they've been involved in some monkey business and they really don't want the information to be revealed publicly.
With the usage of this tool, you can observe that Realtor.com has three domains loaded on this IP address: Barbdraplin.com, Stgeorgehomes4sale.com, and, Realtor.com. Chiefly, each domain simply imitates the content on Realtor.com. Contently, engines view such practices suspiciously for any new site, though it's nothing like to get Realtor.com penalized. The reason behind this is Realtor.com's age equity and likely being white-listed due to such a lofty amount of trusted and organic looking inbound links. In case, if a site seems to be involved in any kind of artificial link scheme, then you can always make use of inverse IP lookup to assist reveal it.
