I just received a nice note from Rick Turner regarding my comment on his blog post about the age of domain names and I thought this is valuable information to share.
Both Google and Yahoo are "Registrars" entitling them to use the historical information of your domain name. So they know if your domain name was registered yesterday, last year or back in the mid 1990's when the internet was still in its infancy. Nobody but Google and Yahoo know the specifics, but the longer that a domain has existed adds to a website's benefit in search rankings.
Deleting an old domain name in favor of a newly registered domain is a MAJOR MISTAKE! On numerous occasions I've seen websites change domain names and drop into obscurity on search engines. Likewise I've seen deleted names picked up by porn sites that exploit this longevity factor for their own profit.
So if you feel that you just have to jazz up your site with a new name ... fine, just don't kill or turn loose of your older more established domain name. That's a valuable asset and part of your business portfolio that you don't want to let go.
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