Ch. 1: Aged domain vs fresh registration

Ch. 1: Aged domain vs fresh registration

Starting my woodworking site in 2023, I had two routes. Buy an aged, clean domain off a marketplace for $350 — instant trust, skip the sandbox. Or register fresh for $11 and wait.

I bought the aged one. Real benefit: I ranked new posts in 3-4 weeks instead of the 5-6 months my fresh test site took. The risk I underrated: I had to spend 4 hours in Wayback Machine and a backlink tool checking it had never been a casino or pharma site. One I almost bought had a Russian gambling history that would've poisoned everything.

The aged domain saved me roughly four months of sandbox. Worth $350. But only because I vetted it obsessively.

Lesson banked: an aged domain buys you out of the sandbox, but its history is now your history. Never buy one you haven't traced back five years in Wayback.