There are so many questions that plague email senders, such as:
- Why do some emails land in your spam folder while others are successfully delivered to your inbox?
- How do certain websites receive almost instant enhanced search engine optimization?
One of the more under-the-radar, yet just as essential, reasons behind the above is domain age.
Q: What is domain age and how does it contribute to email deliverability?
A: Domain age is one of the more under-the-radar, yet just as essential, reasons that answer the two questions above. Within the digital realm, the relative age of an email address helps assess how trustworthy and reputable a potential email correspondence from that email address will be.Â
For example, domains older than ten years are statistically more inclined to achieve thirty percent better email deliverability than their younger counterparts.
This is the article that will explain everything you need to know about email domain age. Together, we’ll explore how it impacts domain authority, positioning, rankings, and deliverability.
Let’s get started and learn all about this little cyberspace time bomb that controls your kingdom.
Domain age is the length of time a domain has been alive and registered.
It is one of the most important factors that Email Service Providers (ESPs) use to assess if an email coming from a domain is legitimate and reputable.
In other words, it’s like the basis of your digital reputation when it comes to your email address; the longer it’s been established, the more email systems can review its past performance and recognize it as a source.
Domain age is determined from the day a domain is first registered.
The registration date is public information and accessible via WHOIS, the domain registration monitoring and archival resource.
Furthermore, every time a domain is renewed, its domain age increases. This is a positive occurrence for domains that seem to remain live. In addition, domains that are registered solely for email purposes factor in domain age as it relates to the email sending domain. The longer the history of activity, the better for ESPs to whitelist a domain.
Since website domains and email domains are registered with creation dates, athey both have “domain ages.” However, they can mean different things.
- The age of a website domain is more critical concerning search engine optimization (SEO). The longer a domain has been around, the more likely it will show up on a list of search engine results as a trusted source.
- The age of a domain matters for email deliverability and it concerns whether or not emails go to someone’s spam or junk folder instead of the intended recipient’s inbox. An older email domain has better email deliverability because spam filters usually accept or whitelist older email domains with proven track records and reputations, whereas newer email domains have no reputation yet.
Domain age factors significantly into whether recipients and ESPs deem an email legitimate or not.
- An older domain already has a history that can be used for assessment—domain owners are either longstanding spammers or long-time legitimate senders.
- The longer someone has owned a domain and conducted itself with legitimate emailing practices, the more ESPs are likely to retain information that the domain has not been spamming in the past. So when someone receives an email from a domain that has been around for a while, ESPs deem it as legit, and they’re less likely to flag it as spam.Â
- Older domains also give users and clientele peace of mind—especially in domains that require intimate email communications, like finance and healthcare—that opening and responding to such a domain is safe.
- Many phishing attacks come from newer domains since they’re easier and cheaper to register and throw away once a hacker gets their fill. So, for virtual security measures or skittish users, newer domains are guilty by association—until they prove otherwise.
Domain reputation matters because it helps ESPs decide whether an email address should go straight to the spam folder—on occasion—or worse, blacklisted.
Q: What is domain reputation?
A: Domain reputation pertains to the trustworthiness and credibility of a domain in the eyes of email service providers (ESPs) and other internet services. The domain reputation is influenced by various factors (email sending practices, spam complaints, bounce rates, and overall engagement).Â
Ultimately, domain reputation is a huge deciding factor when it comes to deciding between the inbox or the spam folder.
Abrupt increases in email volume can indicate spam-like activity. It’s more favorable to send consistent email volumes or slowly increase the emails sent.
🔖 Related Reading: Complete guide – how to send bulk emails without spamming
Good recipient engagement—opens, clicks, and forwards—improves domain reputation because this shows the ESPs that your recipients find value in your messages.
Now, if your emails are constantly unread, ignored, or deleted right away, then this tells your recipients’ ESP that they do not want your emails. Thus, any further messages from you should be rerouted to the spam folder so the receivers will no longer be bothered.
Engagement is dynamic and can be ruined by negative encounters like high bounce rates and spam complaints.
Q. What are bounce rates and spam complaints?
A: Bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that are not delivered to recipients’ inboxes. These may be because of invalid email addresses or server issues.  Spam complaints happen when recipients intentionally mark your email as spam. this sends signals to email service providers that your emails are unwanted.Â
🔖 Additional resources:
ESPs look for spam-like traits in content (e.g., a lot of capitals, deceptive subject lines, and a high image-to-text percentage). Good, pertinent content perceived as valuable by recipients improves reputation. Check out these examples of useful email content.
Standards for authentication practices include SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). These protocols certify that the email content has not been altered in transit and that the domain sending the email is allowed to do so.
🔖 Related Reading: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: Boosting Email Security and Deliverability
A domain’s reputation may seriously be harmed if it is included on Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBLs) or DNS-based blacklists (DNSBLs).
Some ESPs automatically block IPs involved in spamming or other harmful activity using these lists.
🔖 Related Reading: Top 10 IP Address Blacklist Removal Tools [Cons & Pros]
Part of what shapes a domain’s reputation is a long-term perspective on its email sending behavior, including how any problems were fixed.
- Sender score. It indicates how a domain stands in terms of the email sending patterns over time, and this ranges from 0 to 100. Services such as Return Path give sender scores by considering complaints, unknown user rates (emails sent to non-existent addresses), spam trap hits and so on. A higher sender score indicates a good domain reputation.
- IP reputation. The IP reputation also has a lot to do with the reputation of domains as they use that IP address to send emails. ESPs keep an eye on these IPs over time, looking for signs they might be used as spammers. Discrete metrics include engagement rates, blacklist status (of either sending domain or IP), the age of an email address, and how many distinct domains send from a shared/traded/leased/outcome based on classification IP.
- Engagement metrics. Email clients, like Gmail, assign different metrics to define how well recipients engage with emails from your mail domain. It considers open rates, how often your emails get moved to other folders, and even if people delete your emails without ever reading them.
- Open rate. The frequency with which emails are opened by recipients, indicating engagement and interest.
- Click-through rate. Refers to how often recipients click on links within the email, further indicating engagement.
- Read rate. The rate at which emails are read, which can be a more specific indicator of engagement than open rate.
- Reply rate. How often recipients respond to emails, demonstrating active interaction and relevance.
- Forward rate. The frequency with which emails are forwarded to others, suggesting recipients find the content valuable enough to share.
- Number of messages automatically processed as Spam. How often emails are filtered directly into spam folders by email providers.
- Spam complaint rate. The rate at which emails are marked as spam by recipients, negatively impacting domain reputation.
- Number of messages deleted without being opened: Indicates disinterest or distrust before the content is even viewed.
- Number of messages marked as ‘Not Spam’ by the recipient. This can help recover a domain’s reputation if it is initially misclassified as spam.
- Hard bounces. Emails sent to non-existent or invalid email addresses, affecting sender reputation.
- Number of messages that fall into spam traps. Emails caught by special addresses that identify spammy behavior, severely affecting reputation.
Google determines a domain’s age based on when it was first indexed, not the date it was registered.
Therefore, if a domain has been registered and parked for a few months and hasn’t been visited by someone other than Google or an active site, the “start date” for Google to calculate domain age commences only when the site is crawled and inserted into the system.
Is domain age a ranking advantage or disadvantage?
From a Google standpoint, domain age is a consideration for ranking.
But a comparative findings assessment renders the conclusion that domain age is not a consideration.
However, the considerations from Google suggest that it is an advantageous factor for a site because of trust factors. After all, it has been around for some time already—but once again, content, relevancy, and user metrics reign supreme over domain age.
Perhaps the only time it would be an absolute advantage or disadvantage is in an exceptionally competitive niche where domain registration for 1 year versus 10 years could be the remaining deciding factor. But other than that, it doesn’t hold a candle to the necessity of time and energy spent on continuous SEO and quality content.
When it comes to SEO, domain age has a minuscule role in trust and authority but not enough to be the sole deciding factor for legitimization.
Things like content creation, UX, mobile responsiveness, and technical SEO will always prevail.
However, domain age is more important for email marketing. Older email domains are simply trusted by ESPs more, which means better deliverability and less chance of hitting the spam folder.
The notion that domain age is important for SEO but not for email marketing implies that these online marketing fields operate by different standards.Â
Where SEO standards would still champion content and user interaction, email marketing relies upon the importance of a clear domain, good sender reputation, and an incremental increase in age.
In other words, it counts—but only in certain circumstances.Â
New domains are less trusted because they have no concrete performance history to show, meaning these domains are scrutinized by ESPs even more.
When an email is scrutinized, it’s considered spam or it doesn’t make it to the inbox. New domains are more likely to trigger spam filters in the first place, as they have not yet shown their worth or engaged with best practices.
In addition, something as simple as a bounce rate or someone marking something as spam will ruin the reputation from day one, making it that much more challenging to restore trust ever again.
Implement SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) to authenticate your email origins and ensure that the messages are not tampered with in transit. These are critical for building trust with ESPs.
You can easily set up recordings with Warmy’s free DMARC and SPF Record Generator.
On a regular basis, remove any unengaged subscribers, invalid email addresses, and opt-out recipients.
This lowers the likelihood of bounce rates and spam complaints—two important indicators of a sender’s reputation.
Send more and more emails gradually over time.
A good sending reputation is established in part by starting with a smaller, more involved set of recipients. New domains especially benefit from this technique, called IP warming, but existing domains starting new campaign types also benefit.
Warmy’s research team conducts experiments on a regular basis designed to unlock the inner workings of email deliverability. This recent report examines how different warmup strategies affect the deliverability of emails from newly created domains.
Read it here: The Science and Process of Warming Up Newly Created Email Domains.
Ensure that the material in your emails is valuable, worthwhile, and interesting to your readers. High open rates and click-through rates can help your domain’s reputation and are encouraging to ESPs.
Keep an eye when receivers flag your emails as spam, sign up for feedback loops with the big email service providers. Thanks to this input, you can deal with problems quickly and modify your approach to reduce unpleasant encounters.
To determine which parts of your email—such as subject lines, content, and send times—work best for your audience, test them often. Better engagement and hence better deliverability can result from optimizing using performance data.
Warmy.io is a tool that can greatly enhance email warming efforts for successful email deliverability.
It can also determine the age of your email domain relative to when it was created shortly after you set it up. Then, Warmy.io uses the most time-tested and appropriate practices to warm your email domain to ESPs.
WHOIS lookup tools are one of the most straightforward methods for checking domain age. These services provide detailed information about a domain, including the registration date, which is essential for determining its age.Â
There are several dedicated tools available online that can instantly provide the age of a domain.
These tools, such as SmallSEOTools, WebConfs, and SEOChat, require you to enter the domain name, and they fetch the registration date along with how long the domain has been active.
Select a domain age checker tool. Choose a tool such as SmallSEOTools’ Domain Age Checker or any other preferred tool that provides domain age information.
Enter the domain name. Navigate to the tool’s website and find the input box where you can type or paste the domain name whose age you want to check.
Initiate the search. Click the “Check”, “Analyze”, or similar button to start the domain age check. The tool will query the database and retrieve the information related to the domain.
Review the results. The tool will display results that typically include the domain’s age, the date it was first registered, and possibly the date it was last updated. Some tools may provide additional information such as the domain’s expiration date.
Interpret the data. Understand that the age of your domain can influence your email deliverability and overall domain reputation. If your domain is relatively new, consider using services like Warmy.io to help establish and improve your domain’s reputation.
Complement your domain age with Warmy's tools to enhance deliverability
Managing and optimizing the age of your email domain requires a strategic approach.Â
For new domains, understanding the challenges and employing techniques like domain warming can accelerate the establishment of a positive reputation.
For older domains, maintaining good practices in email management ensures the continued benefit of a good reputation. Employing tools to monitor and improve email deliverability, such as Warmy.io’s Free Email Deliverability Test, is essential for both new and established domains.
Here are some additional features of Warmy that empower senders to take charge of their email deliverability.
AI-driven email warmup and advanced seed lists to prevent server rejections and spam flags
Many errors occur when ESPs temporarily reject emails from new domains. Warmy.io’s AI-powered email warmup helps mitigate this issue by:
- Gradually increasing email sending volume to prevent sudden spikes that could trigger rejections.
- Simulating human-like interactions so that emails are opened, replied to, and marked as important.
- Monitoring email reputation to identify potential issues before they impact campaigns.
Additionally, Warmy offers the most advanced email seed list. It offers actual engagement. Your emails are opened, scrolled through, clicked on, and replied to. If there are emails that land in spam, these are removed and marked as important to let the ESPs know you are credible.
With the newly introduced API Endpoint for the Established Seed List, email senders can now efficiently access, manage, and configure seed list splits directly from their systems. This removes the need for manual updates and optimizes processes.
Comprehensive insights from deliverability tests and Domain Health Hub
Warmy’s free email deliverability test offers valuable insights and data:
Percentage of your emails that land in the inbox, spam folder, promotions tab, or go undelivered.
Status if your domain or IP is listed on any blacklists
Authentication verification if your email authentication settings, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, are properly configured.
Complementing this is the Domain Health Hub—a new standard in email deliverability monitoring.
Rather than tracking performance of individual email addresses, Warmy.io offers a domain-level health dashboard. The hub also contains:
- A domain health score based on various factors (authentication, blacklist status, and inbox placement tests)
- Spam rate trends and overall deliverability performance
- Comprehensive DNS status checks
Additional warmup preferences to maximize inbox placement
This new feature empowers senders to fully take charge of their warmup process by being able to customize the warmup’s distribution across different providers. They can also choose if they want to use B2B or B2C customers for engagement patterns to tailor the behavior and insights to their business type. All of these settings can be changed right within the Warmy system for hassle-free customer experience.
Start your journey to email deliverability success today
Ultimately, a well-considered email strategy that takes into account the age of your domain and its ongoing reputation management can lead to enhanced deliverability, greater engagement, and more successful email marketing outcomes.
Remember, in the digital age, the credibility and reliability of your email domain can make a significant difference in connecting effectively with your audience.
Try Warmy for free now or book a demo with an expert to see how the right tool can transform your business.
What is domain age?
Domain age refers to the length of time a domain has been registered and active. In the context of email, it's used by email service providers to assess the reliability of emails sent from that domain.
Why does domain age matter?
Domain age matters because it influences trust and credibility. Older domains are often perceived as more trustworthy and are less likely to be flagged as spam, leading to better email deliverability.
Can new domains achieve good email deliverability?
Yes, new domains can achieve good deliverability, but they may face challenges due to a lack of historical reputation. Implementing good email practices, like using proper authentication and gradually increasing email volume, can help build a positive reputation over time.
How can I check my domain's age?
You can check your domain's age using WHOIS lookup services or dedicated domain age checker tools available online. These tools will provide the exact date of registration, helping you determine the age of your domain.
Does domain age affect security perceptions?
Yes, older domains with a long history of secure operations are generally perceived as safer by users and cybersecurity systems. New domains might be viewed with suspicion and require time and consistent secure practices to build similar trust.
How can I improve my domain's reputation despite its age?
Focus on maintaining high-quality email practices, use robust email authentication methods (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), keep a clean mailing list, and monitor your email engagement to improve your domain's reputation, regardless of its age.
