Do old domains have more authority? We checked 224 aged domains

Key findings

• Old does not mean authoritative. The 224 domains have a median age of 22.4 years and 81% are 20 or more years old, yet 96% have a Semrush Authority Score of 2 or less out of 100. The highest score in the whole set is 6.
• The backlinks are still there. Every domain but one still has referring domains: a median of 251, and 17 domains with 500 or more (the most is 1,011).
• Age barely predicts anything. The rank correlation between age and referring domains is 0.09, and between referring domains and Authority Score it is 0.15. Both are close to zero.
• Most of these domains were quietly broken. At the audit, 90 had no working DNS or hosting and 53 pointed at servers no longer in use. 14 were showing someone else's website, because their DNS still pointed at old shared IP addresses that had been reassigned.

The data

We audited a real portfolio of 224 domains held by one owner, most registered between the mid 1990s and the early 2010s and used for client sites, small businesses and projects that have since stopped. On October 7, 2026 we checked each domain live: registrar records (RDAP), nameservers, DNS, what the domain actually serves over HTTP, and its Semrush Authority Score and referring domains.

This is not a random sample of the web. It is what an old, mostly idle portfolio looks like, which is exactly the situation of anyone sitting on aged domains or thinking of buying one.

Age of the domains

Referring domains rise only slightly with age (the youngest bands hold just a handful of domains), from a median of 60 for the youngest to 284 for domains 25 years or older. Authority Score does not rise at all.

Authority Score: almost everything sits at 2

Semrush's Authority Score blends link power, organic traffic and spam signals. A domain that has had no site and no traffic for years keeps its old links, but it has nothing else, and the score reflects that. In this set, hundreds of referring domains did not lift a dormant domain above a score of 6.

What the domains were actually doing

The 14 misdirected domains are the most surprising finding. Their owner still held them, but their DNS pointed at shared hosting IP addresses from years ago. The hosts had since given those addresses to other customers, so the domains were serving strangers' websites. Search engines and visitors had no way to tell.

What this means for you

1. Do not buy an expired domain for its age. Age alone did not come with authority in any of these 224 cases.
2. Look at the links, not the score, and then look at why the score is low. A dormant domain with hundreds of real referring domains and a low score may only need a real site. A domain whose links are spam is a different story; see our expired domains study.
3. Audit DNS on every domain you keep. Point idle domains at a parking page or a redirect you control. Never leave them pointing at a host where you no longer have an account.
4. Track what happens after a relaunch. We are rebuilding sites on part of this portfolio and publishing the numbers in our live case study.

Method and limits

• Sample: 224 domains from one owner's registrar account (.com 185, .net 22, .us 7, .info 5 and a few others). Ages are measured from the registration date in the registrar record to October 7, 2026.
• Metrics: Semrush Authority Score and referring domains for the root domain, U.S. database, checked October 7, 2026. Status comes from live DNS lookups and HTTP requests on the same day.
• Correlations are Spearman rank correlations, which handle the very uneven link counts better than a straight line would.
• Not causal. These domains are old and dormant at the same time, so we cannot separate the effect of age from the effect of years without a site.
• We publish aggregates only. Individual domains are not named.

Download: the aggregate tables as CSV. You are welcome to cite this study with a link to this page.