Aged domain, explained
Age shows in the creation date in WHOIS or RDAP, and it survives only if the name was never deleted. A name bought from its owner, or won in a registrar's expired auction before deletion, keeps its original date; a name caught after it drops is a new registration with a new date. Sellers of aged domains sometimes blur that distinction, so verify the creation date yourself and check the Wayback Machine for how the name was used.
In practice, age by itself is a weak signal. What an older name may carry is a backlink profile, residual traffic and a history, good or bad. Google's spam policies define expired domain abuse as buying an expired name and repurposing it to host low-value content mainly to manipulate rankings, so the classic aged-domain SEO play, especially with AI-written pages, is a direct target. Value an aged domain on the name itself and on verifiable traffic or links, not on its years.
Example. A .com first registered in 1998, renewed every year since and bought directly from its owner is an aged domain that keeps its original creation date.
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Education, not financial, legal or tax advice. Domain investing is speculative and most domain names never sell. Read the disclaimer.