Does domain age matter in rankings ?
John Mueller in a tweet said domain age does nothing for SEO.
It may be worth noting that domain age does show up in Google search results.
Click the three dotted line next to any search results and you will see the following
Domain Sanboxing
Various webmasters have reported their domain to be sandboxed in the first few months of launching.
Sandboxing is when Google restricts new sites from ranking higher on search engines.
This may be despite you have a very good link profile.
Here is Rand Fishkin the founder of Moz.
Google denies the existence of sandbox.
Keywords in Top Level Domain
Having a keyword in your top level domain used to be a popular strategy back in 2010.
This was overly abused by webmasters with hundreds and thousands of domains registered by domain squatters and PBN builders.
It used to provide relevancy signal but now having a keyword in top level domain is not a ranking factor.
Domain History
In a video posted on YouTube by Google Search Central team, Matt Cutts the former head of webspam said that a penalty from an old domain may carry over to the new owner.
This is in light of abused by PBN builders who simply use 301 from old domains to pass authority to new one.
Just as the penalty would carry over to the new owner, in our tests with hundreds of expired domains, the positive authority also carries through.
It is always a good idea to look at Domain’s past ownership, content on that domain, history of registrations and also any wayback results pointing to webspam in general.