What is Domain Age and how does it impact my email deliverability?

Did you know that brand-new domains are treated differently than aged domains? This can affect everything from how well your website performs in search engines to the deliverability of your company emails. 

Domain age definition

Domain age is a fairly simple concept: it’s the amount of time that your domain name has been registered and active. A domain that was registered yesterday has a domain age of one day, and a domain registered five years ago has an age of five years. 

Older domains generally have a better reputation and are considered more trustworthy by many services. Older domains generally rank better in search engines and have better email deliverability, as long as they haven’t been used for spam in the past.

Does domain age affect deliverability?

There are many factors that impact your email deliverability, such as your sender reputation, authentication, past sending practices, and your domain’s age.

Over the long term, domain age has a relatively small relationship with deliverability, with one big exception: New domains.

Generally, ISPs consider older domains to be more reputable and trustworthy than new domains, but an old domain with a poor reputation will still have deliverability issues. 

A brand-new domain with zero reputation or history may appear on blacklists designed to flag new domains, and the only way to be removed from them is to wait for your domain to age.

For example, Spam Eating Monkey (a blacklist provider) has several blacklists that include all recently registered domains. These include blacklists such as the SEM-FRESH blacklist for domains registered in the last five days and the SEM-FRESH30 blacklist for domains registered in the last 30 days. Each of these blacklists automatically adds and removes domains that were created in that time period, and there is no way to manually be removed from them while your domain is still not old enough.

In the instance of a new domain, your email deliverability will be negatively affected until your domain is removed from these blacklists. You may find with newer domains that emails go to spam more often, are less likely to end up in the main inbox, having worse overall deliverability.

In general, even domains greater than 30 days old that are less than 60-90 days old have worse deliverability than old ones because of these reasons. During this period, it’s best to warm up your domain to ensure solid deliverability after you’ve been removed from these blacklists.

How can you improve your domain age and reputation?

The only way to change your domain age is to have an active domain for a long period of time. The older your domain, the less likely it is to be flagged by age-related blacklists.

The good news is that new domains start off without any sender history or reputation, so you can start fresh if you’ve experienced deliverability problems in the past. During your first few weeks of sending with a new domain, it’s best to ramp up volume slowly to the domain to ensure great deliverability from the get-go.